Gadgetory

why you might ask because and I'll stop doing this the WD TV live is a network media player and the WD livewire is a way to more easily network your house now if you want to know what this is I'll say in a nutshell this is powerline Ethernet if you already know what powerline Ethernet is you probably don't need to keep watching unless you really want to know the specifics of the WD livewire so if you don't know what power line is Ethernet is then stay tuned and I'm going to explain the whole thing so first of all this is a powerline AV network kit so that means you've got up to 200 megabits per second data transfer speeds so you can stream HD you can connect up to 8 devices so two adapters by four ports very cool on the side we see some more information aha so they're comparing powerline vs Wi-Fi it is faster and more reliable yeah I'm with them on that one is immune to interference it is easy to install and they are both protected by encryption so you've got two adapters with a total of four ports so that means you can connect up to seven devices and your router all protected with 128-bit encryption create high-speed Internet connection anywhere in your home without running wires between rooms yes that is the beauty of powerline so what you do with a powerline adapter and I'm actually a maybe I'll even do like a practical demonstration of this okay we've got an installation CD which I can't imagine there'd be any use for then we have a technical support limited warranty guide we have the movie livewire a QuickStart guide so step one plug in step two you win aha the CD is just a user manual yeah that's what I figured okay so we've got a couple of Gigabit Ethernet cables we have one live wire alright then we go for ports on there and as well as a sync button which I've never actually had to use with any modern power line kit there's an on/off switch in case you want to turn off your network and there is an important little bit of instructions you never plug a powerline kit into a power bar it can cause interference you want to get directly into the wall although I have seen them work green power bars before I mean for the best results though you always want to talk them directly into the wall and power line does have some other limitations as well you need to be some houses have sort of half of the circuits or on one half and half of the circuits are on the other half and they can't communicate between each other but even if you've got to power like two wall plugs that are on separate circuits as long as they're sort of within that same grouping they'll be able to communicate with each other so I don't know what WD is done to overcome that some of the biggest problems with powerline tend to be incompatibility with network adapters or any compatibility with routers but with a product from WD I would be surprised to see any of those issues and I will test it out a little bit hopefully over the net well my battery died just in time for me to suggest testing it so off-camera I've gone and hooked up the live wire so I've got it running you can see there's the four Ethernet ports on the back of the unit so I just plugged into any random one and then I have a wire running to a wall outlet here in my computer room and going into my gigabit switch okay if we're gonna test its capabilities by going all the way downstairs okay hi rocket Captree so we're way down to the living room where we will find a TV which is connected to a media PC which is connected to a WT live wire okay and oh I actually made a mistake and I plugged it in through a power bar but in my testing it worked anyway so we're gonna fire up Big Buck Bunny which is a 1080p video clip a free one and we're going to demonstrate that it plays 1080p video just nicely you don't really have to watch the rest of this video because it's just gonna be Big Buck Bunny yeah maybe we can skip around to somewhere where there's slightly faster action so the bitrate might be a little bit higher anyway flawless playback on 1080 piece because it is a 200 megabit per second connection unlike most power line kits these days which are about a hundred megabit per second the 200 megabit per second ones are quite a bit more extensive in most cases but you can see that it does give you the capability to run full HD video over powerline and I'd imagine we would even get slightly better performance if we were using the livewire directly plugged into the wall you can see skipping around in the video isn't giving us too much success here but that's okay all right why don't we actually go do a file transfer now so why don't we take that file and just copy it right to the desktop here yeah I guess that's about in line with my expectations