Western Digital WDBPUF0000NBK WD TV Media Player with Wi-Fi and Ethernet Connectivity (Certified Refurbished)

Unit powered on when I plugged it in. I powered it off with the remote and tried to power it back on. Nothing! Tried a few more time to get it to power back on, checked the remote by removing my batteries and replacing them...Nothing. I packed it back in the box it came in a returned it.

I have a number of these WDTV units; one is connected to virtually all my televisions. I also connected each WDTV unit to an individual external hard drive that contains my digitized movie collection and my CD collection. I use the external hard drive instead of the WiFi connectivity because it seemed like every time I was streaming a movie from my media server, the WiFi connection would have some type of interruption and I would need to either reconnect the WDTV or reboot the media server ruining the enjoyment of watching the movie. With the directly connected hard drive there is never a problem. The WDTV plays virtually all formats of video and audio so it is very versatile. One serious weakness is that it has a limited number of aps that allow the WDTV to connect it to outside streaming services. It previously had aps for Netflix and VUDU, but the most recent firmware update removed those two apps for some inexplicable reason. Theoretically write your own apps and I downloaded the instructions from Western Digital, but the app writing process is above my skill level.Unfortunately, Western Digital doesn't make the WDTV units any longer, so you will either need to settle for a refurbished or used unit or you can pay "scalper" prices for a new unit, if you can find one. WDTVs use to have an original retail cost of around $90 to $100, but I have seen new units going for around $300 now (mid 2016). Luckily most of mine were bought at the original pricing about 4 or 5 years ago and they are still going strong. I did buy two of the refurbished units from Amazon and am happy with them. One of those units did not play either the video or audio files on the external hard drive, but as typical, Amazon made an exchange easy and the replacement unit works fine.

Product powered up and worked for about 5 minutes before screen went black despite still having power. All attempts to reboot/reset device failed. Searching online finds many other people with the exact same problem with this device. Not sure if it fails because it is refurbished and poor work was done refurbishing, or if this product is just junk regardless. Either way I would avoid.

Don't let the other reviews scare you. Yes, it's a re-certified product and no there is no reason whatsoever to be concerned about that. I own and continue to own 4 wdtv live boxes and wanted a backup because I know that Western Digital aren't making these anymore, so I took the plunge on a re-certified model for a decent price. If your entire media collection revolves around media viewing from a USB Flash drive, USB hard drive or Network connected drive ( NAS) , then this is the one to have. It'll play pretty much any format and that's good enough for me as a media player. There was a recent firmware update for this along with the older WDTV Live model which makes the U.I interface a bit snappier and fixed some of the playback issues that were causing certain formats to freeze the box. I'll bet a lot of people had returned perfectly good WDTV boxes because they were encountering this playback issue and all it took to fix it was a firmware fix....which was pretty pathetic on Western Digital's part, because it took 2 years to get it and to fix the problem Western Digital had created, most people were rolling back the firmware on these boxes to an earlier version to make it work the way it should. The one that I received looked new, the remote looked new and after the newest firmware update, which came up as soon as the box booted up, runs like new. I've done some testing and I have no complaints because all MP4, MKV and AVI content work just fine. Just know that this model does not include Netflix, which if you're like me, you've got another dozen devices around that plays Netflix, so no great loss.If you read the other reviews, you think you're getting some substandard product. I'm sure originally it was mislabeled incorrectly by Western Digital as most people thought they were getting something brand new, instead of a re-certified product. I've had re-certified products and if they all looked and ran like this one, I wouldn't have any complaints whatsoever, so keep an open mind on this one and know that Amazon has your back if you really need to return it.

Not advertised as Refurbished, came with a dirty remote that barely works unless I smash the buttons. Not happy with this purchase.

We currently own five of these, and we attached a 5TB Seagate Expansion Desktop Hard Drive to each of them for local media playback. All five media players are also connected to our home router by ethernet cables, and we renamed each player with it's respective room location in the home. (We prefer watching from locally attached drives, so that we never have issues with wireless streaming or even with trying to access a single hard-wired drive that is shared on the network, but these are also viable options, of course.) We are able to add media content to any of the attached hard drives directly from our desktop computer in the office. Even though they are hard-wired to our network, the transfer rate is still rather slow from the desktop, through the media player, and on to it's attached hard drive (less than 10Mb/s), but it is reliable. Playback is flawless, no problems with any formats whatsoever. Definitely worth the money!

It didn't work