Western Digital Livewire Powerline Networking Kit Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
998 words · ~4 min read
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why you might ask because and I'll stop doing that the wdtv live is a network
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media player and the WD Live Wire is a way to more easily Network your house
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now if you want to know what this is I'll say in a nutshell this is power
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line Ethernet if you already know what power line Ethernet is you probably
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don't need to keep watching unless you really want to know the specifics of the
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WD Live Wire so if you don't know what Powerline Ethernet is then stay tuned
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and I'm going to explain the whole thing so first of all this is a powerline AV
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Network kit so that means you've got up to 200 megabit perss uh data transfer
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speeds so you can stream HD you can connect up to eight devices so two
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adapters by four ports very cool on the side we see some more
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information aha so they're comparing power line versus wi-fi it is faster and
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more reliable yeah I'm with them on that one it is immune to interference it is
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easy to install and they are both protected by encryption so you've got
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two adapters with a total of four ports so that means can connect up to seven
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devices and your router all protected with 128bit encryption create high-speed
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internet connection anywhere in your home without running wires between rooms
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yes that is the beauty of power line so what you do with a power line network
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adapter and I'm actually maybe I'll even do like a quick practical demonstration
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of this okay we've got an installation CD
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which I can't imagine there'd be any use for then we have a technical support
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limited warranty guide we have we have WD Live Wire a quick start
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guide so step one plug
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in step two you Inn aha the CD is just a user
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manual yeah that's what I figured Okay so we've got a couple of gigabit
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Ethernet cables we have one Live
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Wire all right there we go four ports on there as well as a sync button which
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I've never actually had to use with any modern power line kit there's an onoff
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switch in case you want to turn off your network and there is an important little
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bit of instructions you never plug a power line kit into a power bar it can
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cause interference you want to plug it directly into the wall although I have
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seen them work through Power Bars before I mean for the best results though you
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always want to plug them directly into the wall and power line does have some
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other limitations as well you do need to be uh some houses have sort of uh half
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of the circuits are on one half and half of the circuits are on the other half
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and they can't communicate between each other but even if you've got two power
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um like two wall plugs that are on separate circuits as long as they're
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sort of within that same grouping they'll be able to communicate with each
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other so I don't know what wd's done to overcome that uh some of the biggest
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problems with power line tend to be uh incompatibility with network adapters or
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incompatibility with routers um but with
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a product from WD I would be surprised to see any of those issues and I will
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test it out a little bit uh hopefully over the well my battery died just in
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time for me to suggest testing it so off
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camera I've gone and hooked up the Live Wire so I've uh got it running you can
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see there's the uh four Ethernet ports on the back of the unit so I've just
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plugged into any random one and then I have a wire running to a wall outlet
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here in my computer room and going into my gigabit
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switch okay and we're going to test its
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capabilities by going all the way
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downstairs okay High
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rocket okay here we go here's my cat
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tree so we're way down to the living room where we will find a TV which is
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connected to a media PC which is
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connected to a WD Live Wire okay and oh
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I actually made a mistake and I plugged it in through a power bar but
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um in my testing it worked anyway so we're going to fire up Big Buck Bunny
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which is a 1080p video
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clip a free
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one and we're going to demonstrate that it plays 1080p video just
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nicely you don't really have to watch the rest of this video because it's just
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going to be Big Buck Bunny
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here maybe we can skip around to somewhere where there's slightly faster
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action so the uh bit rate might be a
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little bit
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higher anyway Flawless playback on 1080
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piece because it is a 200 megabit per second connection um unlike most power
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line kits these days which are uh about 100 megabit per second the 200 megabit
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per second ones are quite a bit more expensive in most cases but you can see
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that it does give you the capability to run full HD
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video over power line and I'd imagine we would even get
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slightly better performance if we were
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using the uh the live wire directly
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plugged into the wall you can see skipping around in the video isn't
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giving us too much success here but that's okay all right why don't we
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actually go do a file transfer now so why don't we take that
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file and just copy it right to the desktop
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here yeah I guess that's about in line with my
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expectations um