23" HD Digital Picture Frame - $300

[MarkBarbieri]

I've been looking for a large, high quality digital picture frame for a while and have been frustrated by what I could find. This week, I took a different approach.

I bought a refurbed monitor (Asus VH232H) for $145 shipped from Newegg. It has an HDMI input and a native resolution of 1920x1080. I bought a WD TV Live from Amazon for $119. I also got an HDMI cable for $5 and a 16GB USB flash drive for $32.

The WD TV Live is a tiny little media player. It's capable of playing videos, music, and pictures. The video player handles a variety of codecs, including 1080p Blu-ray files. It can also display photos in a slideshow. The slideshows aren't super configurable, but I was able to set the display time to 5 seconds and the transition to a simple fade, which is what I wanted.

The USB flash drive should be able to hold an insane number of jpgs at 1920x1080. I'm guessing that I could get 16,000 pictures at 100% jpg quality and much more with a little more compression. So far, I've tested it with 800 pictures and it works great.

I'm going to stick the WD TV to the back of the monitor with some double sided tape. The monitor still looks like a monitor (no fancy wooden bezel), but it has a nice clean look.

I could have saved $20 by getting the regular WD TV (it has no networking capability), but I want to test the WD TV Live as a potential replacement for my HTPCs and possibly even for my car PC.

If anyone is interested in pictures of how it looks and how everything fits together, let me know and I'll post something. It was super easy to set up. The only issue that I see so far is that, when you start it up, you have to click through the menu to go into picture display mode.

 

[k5jm]

Great idea. I ran across a similar concept with an old laptop.

 

[NateNLogansDad]

I'd love to see it! It sounds like an awesome idea. What about cutting a hole in the wall and mount it inside, than take a picture frame, pull the back off but leave the glass and place it over top?

 

[Dawn19]

Great idea, i would like to see it

 

[Golf4food]

Do show! Do show!

 

[MarkBarbieri]

This is a picture of my 10 year old holding the media player with a USB flash drive mounted in one of the two USB slots.

Here is the device mounted to the back of the monitor. The device was a bit too large to mount in the cutaway portion at the bottom of the monitor. I'm going to be setting this on my desk at the office, so depth isn't a big issue for me.

Not sure how relevant it is, but here is a shot of the front of the monitor. If I wanted to get fancy, I'd put a matte and frame on the monitor.

I've experimented with it as a video playback device and I have to say that it is far from perfect. When you "play" a DVD folder, there is a 5 second blank screen pause between VOB files. It doesn't appear to understand chapters, so it is a pain to go to a particular point in a video. It plays Blu-ray m2ts files without a hitch (so far). I'm still experimenting before I declare this to be future HTPC or car pc replacement. If anyone is interested, I'll post information about that after my experiments.

 

[MICKEY88]

I'm still experimenting before I declare this to be future HTPC or car pc replacement. If anyone is interested, I'll post information about that after my experiments.

I'm always interested in your experiments, you always have great ideas, and your reports are very educational for others who might want to try something similar..