14 DAY TRIAL // Western Digital may have gained its fortune from making and selling storage solutions, and while it definitely focuses on this business outlet, it is not limited to it. In fact, the company deals in a variety of other things, such as media players like the Elements Play line. Nevertheless, WD's strong suit remains storage, HDD in particular,, and the outfit decided it would leverage its expertise to maximize the appeal of this media player series.
The hardware and consumer electronics maker has only just unveiled the line and it did so with stealth, not issuing a press release or other form of announcement. Basically, the Elements Play is a high-capacity all-in-one media player that handles a variety of file formats in quality of up to Full HD 1080p. The list of supported video and audio codecs and formats includes RMVB, H264, MKV and Monkey's Audio, among others.
The main asset of the electronic is, predictably, its storage space. For storing files internally, Western Digital gave it a hard disk drive of no less than 2TB. Needless to say, this will allow users to load a significant number of movies or other types of videos onto it. Other specifications include camera compatibility, DVD complete menu navigation, music playlist support for PLS, M3U, WPL file types, Multi-language subtitle support and video preview. What's more, the device can play a selected media automatically, has digital optical audio and supports SPDIF and Dolby Digital native playback.
The Full HD-ready Elements Play is compatible with AAC, MP3, JPEG, USB 2.0, Energy Star, Real Media, HDMI, SimplayHD, H.264, MKV and Dolby Digital. Its price is unknown, but Engadget speculates it should be as little as $229 if it hopes to be competitive with the likes of LaCie's LaCinema Classic HD, which has UPnP / DLNA server support as a bonus over WD's offering.