Creating custom movies or music playlists for your WD TV or WD TV Live Media Hub using macOS

The Western Digital WD TV (Live) is still a very decent multimedia hub to play almost any movie, audio or image file format directly on your TV.

If you own a Mac and working on macOS, you were probably wondering, how you can create custom playlists for the WD TV, in order to…

• …easy access a collection of music tracks or movies
• …create a playlist for newly added movies on your WD TV
• …or browse more easily and quicker content on your WD TV

The answer is: create a custom .m3u-playlist file and drop it on your WD TV!

How to create an .m3u-playlist for your WD TV

1. 1. Open a text editor of your choice (macOS TextEdit.appis fully sufficient)
   2. Paste the following string as the very first line:

      #EXTM3U

   3. Now you can start adding a list of content which you want to access through the playlist:
      • For every entry, you will need 2 lines:
        1. Line: an #EXTINF line containing infos or meta data of the file, following this structure:

           #EXTINF:[Duration^1],[Title^2]

           ^1 the Duration can be any value – it doesn’t need to match the actual playing duration of the file!
           ^2 be carful not to add any commas “,” as part of the Title

        2. Line: the relative path (as seen from your WD TV) to location where the file is saved at
   4. When done, save the text file with any name and – important! – choose .m3u as the file’s extension.
   5. Copy this file on to your WD TV respectively the harddrive you have connect to your WD TV.
   6. Done – you can now open the playlist & play any content from it via your WD TV

Here’s a movie playlist example for the WD TV

File: New Movies.m3u

Enhance the .m3u-playlist with a nice playlist image

Adding a beautiful teaser image for your playlist on the WD TV or WD TV Live is very simple:

• just add a .jpg-image with the same name as the .m3u-playlist file at the same location on the WD TV drive
• the recommended size for the image is 300 x 450 pixels
• the file format must be JPEG (.jpg)

Here is an example teaser image for the WD TV compatible to .m3u-playlist files:

Beautifying movies and tv shows with all meta data & cover images

There is are two awesome apps for adding various meta data and beautiful large cover- & background-images to movies and tv shows on your WD TV – and their are cross-platform, meaning compatible with Windows, Linux and macOS:

• HubFlow Media Manager
• tinyMediaManager