Ever wish you can listen to your digital music, view your photos your photos and videos stored on your PC’s hard disk on your living room TV or LCD display, while you lay back on the couch?

Sure you can with a complicated and expensive home networking system, do it the messy way and run long video and audio cables from your PC all the way to your TV, or the old-fashioned way and first burn your favourite media to CDs or DVDs -- which can take up to half a day for a feature-length video -- then play it in your VCD or DVD player.

Otherwise, you, your family and friends will just have to huddle around your PC’s small screen to view your photos and videos, and in no great comfort.

There were close to 334 million GB of photos and over 3.1 billion GB of videos will be stored on desktop and notebook PCs worldwide in 2008, according to respected research firm IDC.

Now that’s a heck of a lot of content trapped on PCs, but well-known hard disk manufacturer Western Digital now offers a much easier way to view them on your TV of LCD.

It’s first non-disk device, the WD TV HD (high-definition) Media Player lets you listen to music, view your favourite videos and photos stored on your removal hard disk, USB-drive, digital cameras, camcorders, the Apple iPod and music players with USB output, which it displays directly on your TV screen in high-definition up to the Full-HD 1080p or in standard definition.

All you need do is to transfer your media files from your PC into your portable USB storage device, then walk over and plug it into the player attached to your TV or LCD panel.

It has two USB 2.0 ports and can access two USB drives simultaneously, has a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) and three RCA ports for composite video and stereo sound for compatibility with standard-definition TVs still used by most people.

When the storage media are plugged in the player automatically scans them for compatible media files and its advanced navigation features let users browse content by filename or by photos, album covers and movie cover art in a single menu regardless of which drive or folder they are located in on the media.

 “It lets you not only create custom slide shows from their photos but you can also select one of your favourite songs as the soundtrack as well,” said Craig Davis, Western Digital director for Sales & Marketing, Branded Products.

The player is compatible with MPEG 1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid & AVC), H.264, MKV and MOV (MPEG4 & H.264) videos; MP3, WMA, OG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AC, FLAG, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF & MKA audio; JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP & PNG photos; PLS, M3U & WPL playlists; and SRT (UTF-8) subtitles, but not with protected premium content such as music and videos downloaded from iTunes Store, Cinema Now, Movielink, Amazon Unbox, and Vongo.

The highly compact player measures 100 x 125 x 40mm and weighs 302.5g.

It was launched at PC Fair last December and is available in IT malls, Challenger and Seng Heng stores at an affordable recommended retail price of RM399.

The package includes the WD TV HD Media Player, compact remote control with batteries, composite AV cable, mains adaptor, a stand for a Western Digital My Passport portable drive, ArcSoft MediaConverter 2.5 software (Windows only) to convert music, photos and video files into formats optimised for the player and a quick installation guide.