My brother just bought one of these babies.
He was interested in it for awhile now and I just went down to visit him and took my PS3 along. After seeing it work and play movies and TV series directly from an external drive he was sold! He already has a very nice BD player, so he had no interest in a PS3. As for the Popcorn Hour, he doesn't have a cat5 cable down in his HT area, and doesn't plan on it. Plus since he's new at archiving to a drive, he didn't want to spend a lot of money and then decide he didn't like it afterall.
As far as file compatability, from what I see it plays everything, including .vob files, so that's a moot point.
He couldn't get the unit while I was down there because Best Buy was completely sold out. He tried later and they were sold out again so he ended up ordering it online and just got it the other day. So right now I haven't seen it in person.
I did give him a 320GB My Book knowing he was going to get this baby soon and this way he'd have a drive to play around with. While I was down there I reformatted the My Book to NTFS. This way he would have no 4GB file size limitation and no compression at all no matter how slight.
I then loaded it up with all four seasons of The Man from U.N.C.L.E, 48 DVDs worth of TV series right there! Then we did all the U.N.C.L.E movies, which was another 8 DVDs, and then the entire series of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. ... another 15 DVDs. Again nothing was compressed one bit. This pretty much filled the 320GB drive, but him and I were geeking out that something the size of a Stephen King novel had around 72 DVDs worth of UNCLE on it! (The shelf space for the TVseries DVDS alone takes up around a foot!)
Until he got the Media player, he had the drive hooked to his computer and 22" HDTV/monitor in his bedroom. He got the player yesterday, plugged it in, hooked it to his receiver and 60" SXRD and plugged the drive in. He said it took quite awhile for the Media Player to sort through everything on the drive, around 20 minutes I think he said. After that, he was clicking away with the remote and watching everything on his big set!
I asked him if there was any video quality issues, or audio sync issues and he said none at all. So the method I outlined to use the PS3 as a media server also works like a champ for the WD Media player.
He wasn't too impressed with the remote or the menu sytem, and as of now he hasn't played around with thumbnail images or anything like that. Overall though he is extremely happy right now and I have have him hooked on the idea of archiving things to external drives like I'm doing!
I've heard comments about the WD's short comings, and on other forum have seen people trash it because it doesn't have a network connection, but guys come on... this baby is just a bit over $100, (I think he paid $129) and it's bound to come down in price some too. It seems to upconvert okay, but that's a hard one to really tell because the SXRD also upconverts. For $100 you couldn't build anything that does what this thing does that's for sure.
Sure it doesn't have networking, but not everyone wants or needs that. If you do, then yeah sure spend the extra on a Popcorn Hour. If you don't have a Bluray player yet and want one as well as this functionality... then take a good look at the PS3. It now even decodes True HD onboard as well as supports play lists and streaming video over a network.
For the money, this is one slick little device, and the menu system as well as other things could be improved and added with future firmware updates. Don't sell it short!
