Over the past fifteen years I’ve had a front row seat to the evolution of streaming digital content to televisions. While most modern televisions have the ability to stream both locally and externally hosted content, streaming video to a “dumb” TV fifteen years ago took a lot more effort. When I set cobbled together my first streaming network nearly twenty years ago, I crammed a dedicated computer into a small cubby inside my living room’s entertainment center and connected it to my television using a video card with an s-video cable. The living room PC was connected to my upstairs media server using a network cable that ran out the back of the entertainment center and literally up a flight of stairs, connecting the two machines.
Back in 2011 I purchased my Boxee box, the first add-on box I owned that allowed me to wirelessly stream content to my television. It’s kind of funny, reading my initial review of Boxee. (“I can now watch YouTube on my television!”) A year or two later I stumbled across Western Digital’s WD TV Live, which I found on sale while visiting Fry’s. I’ve seen them referred to by a few different names like WD TV and WD TV Live, but when I first saw them they were labeled WD Live, which is how I’ve always referred to them. The WD Live is a little box that uses your home’s WiFi network to stream local content (movies on your home computer) and other content like Netflix and YouTube over the internet. You can also play content off an attached USB stick. Again, these are all features built in to most modern flatscreen televisions, but being able to add these features to your television back in 2012 for $99 was pretty amazing.
If I wrote a blog post when I purchased my first WD Live box I can’t find it, but in 2014 I wrote an article about putting together my annual Christmas slideshow and doing it on the WD Live. One neat feature it has is that it can simultaneously play mp3s in random order from one directory while showing pictures in random order from another folder at the same time.
The Boxee device I bought died a low death. Boxee was bought by D-Link and phased out. Updates dried up, which is a death sentence for any cloud-dependent device. YouTube and other built-in streaming apps broke. Eventually, I replaced it with a second WD Live device. By the time I went to buy a third one, the WD Live had already been discontinued (WD stopped production of the device in 2016) so I bought a third one via eBay. I had one WD Live hooked up in the living room, a second one in the bedroom, and the third one in our upstairs den.
And again, like everything… time moves on. The WD Live does not support some of the newest (H.265) encodes, meaning it won’t play some newer content. It also suffers from an outdated interface. Today’s users expect a Neflix-like interface with lots of metadata and large screenshots. The WD Live works best by displaying filenames and nothing more.
Fast forward and today we have multiple DirecTV streaming boxes in our home, all of which do everything the WD Live boxes did. Our televisions also have Netflix and YouTube and all those streaming apps built in. What took a lot of technical knowledge to build 15 years ago now comes built in to every TV sold at Walmart. The WD Live has been rendered obsolete.
Well, almost.
Despite running Plex on my media server and trying everything I can come up with, there doesn’t appear to be any way to play random mp3s while displaying random photos at the same time. Such a seemingly simple thing should be easy to do, but there just doesn’t seem to be any way to do it.
I recently disconnected and boxed up two of my three WD Live boxes and relegated them out to the garage where they will most likely sit unused for the rest of my life. The third, however, I left hooked up in the living room. I may only use it one night a year on Christmas Eve to display my annual Christmas slideshow, but even if that’s all it does, it’ll be worth keeping around.
You should probably use it on New years to play Old Lang syne too.
I use a Raspberry Pi4 and 5 throughout my house for streaming. Maybe you should consider that with Libreelec installed on it. I’m not sure of the ability to play slideshows while playing MP3’s but I’ll take a look when I get a chance. It runs h.265 easily.
I started a similar journey back in 2003(ish) using XP Media Center edition. I ended up cutting a hole in my entertainment center and installing a cooling fan because the computer would run too hot without good air flow.
I switched to Emby from Plex a few years ago because [IMHO] it handles codecs and transcoding better than Plex. I know it’ll do a slideshow with music but I don’t know about randomization. I’ll have to give that a try this weekend. I’m also wondering if there’s an API that can be used to handle this with a bit of custom code.