Western Digital - WD TV Live Media Player (WDTV2) - Page 3

iboum hit the nail on the head. All these other comments about TVs and receivers already being able to do what the WDTV2 claims it will, are preposterous.
Samsung TVs require proprietary software on your server in order to stream all codecs (they will not work with tversity to get support [or vice-versa]). In one way or another, all these integrated media serving devices are gimped.

To the comment about the PS3 being problematic due to the low number of supported codecs: The entire premise of the WDTV2 (over the 1st model) is browsing local media via the ethernet port. If you are already looking at a media server to contain your data, running PS3 Media Server negates ANY codec problems on the PS3.
This is my current solution, watching any and all codecs on the PS3 from my server running PS3MS, and hulu and netflix via PlayOn.
Still, I AM greatly interested in the WDTV2 due to the much smaller environmental impact (as opposed to running the hot PS3 just to watch old TV shows for example), and PANDORA!!!!.

I'm about to give up on WD. I own the 1st gen WDTV, and am getting disgusted by their failure to release firmware updates. They initially engaged with users regarding firmware development, but the appearance is that they exploited that community to help refine features for the Live. That's a crappy thing to do, and their failure to fix poorly implemented features (such as no DVD menus) with firmware updates is inexcusable. At least the NMTs get fairly regular firmware updates.

same

They are not obliged to do DVD menus, you knew that when you bought it...

By users you mean AVS?
Only masochists can hope to get something positive out of their presence on AVS!
They deserve a monument for sticking around for as long as they did...

There has never been a consumer electronic product in existence that after
being discussed on AVS hasn't been eventually trashed by some users!

You want to find a reason not to buy a certain product?
Introduce it to AVS users and wait for a week of discussions.
You'll disgusted you even thought about buying it...

Diogen.

Guys, what device should I be looking for if I need:


1. component output (older TV with no HDMI)

2. can play mkv without needed to run it thru mkv2vob like the PS3 does

3. looking for something in the $99.99 range, or even $89.99

4. doesn't have any of the audio issues or other issues that the WDTV1 had (although to be honest, I don't really know all that much about the issues that the WDTV1 had)

5. Network capabilties would be nice, but I actually would primarily be hooking up a portable 2.0 usb HDD to it. (haven't ran any network cable into my master bedroom, and not looking forward to going up in my crawl space again. Let me tell you... it was a freaking nightmare the last time I did it.)


I've been wanting something very similar to the WDTV1, but I just need it to also have component out. I'm not really up on all the various media playing devices. I've been using my PS3 for this function, along with PS3 Media Server program.

the WDTV2 should essentially cover all of your bases, though the concept of "audio issues" is an abstract one at best. it has a set of audio codecs that it has the rights to distribute/the processor can put out/the hardware is capable of outputting, and as long as you follow those guidelines and are conscious of how you are encoding your video content, you'll be fine.

the one issue still is price; the WDTV1 was introduced with a $130 msrp, and the WDTV2 is expected to have that if not a slightly higher premium, but within a few months brick and mortar shops like Best Buy will even out the prices a bit more towards the $100 mark.

Does anybody know if WDC is going to make this new player capable of playing internet streaming video like Netflix or Amazon?

I agree! $100 is a comfortable price once you own a PS3 or full fledged BLURAY player.

This.


And This.

Acc to Retailer Komplett.ie the player will launch on October the 10.


http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showt...php?p=62244709

I don't know what you expected out of the WDTV1 but I've been completely happy with it. For $100 I got myself a player that can handle 720p or 1080p material unlike my old XBOX. Also, with custom firmware I got a nice little torrent box that uses minimal power and can be on 24/7. DVD menus would be nice but it was never advertised with this feature.

Do you guys think this will have hdmi 1.3 so it can bitstream hd audio?

Hey guys, the wdtv 1 is currently available for £70 which seems like a bargain. I'm really not bothered about dts downmix or network support. Do you think I should still hang on for the wdtv2 or just go for it? I mainly watch 720p/1080p mkv's and some anime.

I started digital video with an Apple TV (can you say, 'Brick', or 'Doorstop', or 'Crapple'?). Yes, the video options STUNK. Then I got the WDTV1. I have yet to find a digital format it can't handle. Sure, the interface ain't like Apple's, but it's sooo much easier to load stuff onto it and it's soooo much friendlier to use in general. However . . .

I still use the Apple TV for photos. Simply put, the screensaver on the Apple TV has not been replicated by anyone. Not even close. This captivating screensaver takes all you photos and in random order and in random sizing 'floats' them up the screen, with your music playing the background. It is the single best way to showcase a photo album bar none.

WHY O WHY can't someone (HINT WD!!) please come up with something similar? This 'jam a photo on the screen and then jam the next one up' is not the best way any more.

For WDTV3, if they do something with this, I'm upgrading. Period.

Amazon has it on pre-order now

Anyone knows the reframes support for this unit??
Oct 10 is a saturday..

Man, do you ever stop bitching???? Jeez...

$120.00 is a pretty good pricepoint for this unit.
I don't think it will be able to do streaming from Netflix, Amazon, etc

Another cool feature is that they will be able to "push" new firmware updates to the box via the Web, versus having to go & d/l it & stick it onto a thumbdrive.

You will probably need an N draft protocol router /dongle for streaming content fast enough from your PC via the network to it, although of course ethernet cable will work too.
Now if they'd only address adding replay gain & gapless playback for audio files.....

And you like digging up nearly-two-week-old posts?

Do we know yet if this device is going to support UnPn so that we can use playon?

I hope people that work for WD are reading this thread.

I will not purchase the new WD Live until it has been confirmed by users that the WD has a proper, stutter-free 24p working. It is unacceptable for this new version to still not do a proper 24p, like most all Blu Ray players can now easily do. I think maybe we should boycott WD until they issue a FW release that fixes 24p in the 1G WDTV as well.

I would also encourage the WD development team to include the ability to automatically output the native framerate/resolution of the file on the fly, bypassing the deinterlacing/scaling of the device, so we can use better deinterlacing/scaling from an external processor, or the one built-in to our displays.

If this is too challenging, the least they could do is place an option in the menu that could be switched on or off according to our preference, so when we start to play a video file, a menu pops up asking us if we want to output 1080p24/1080i/720p/480i/480p, etc. Then we would be spared having to make about half a dozen or more clicks of the remote to get into the menu settings and manually change the resolution each time.

Here's a novel concept. Maybe WD could actually program the player to store our preferred settings in a little folder on the HDD, just like it stores everything else, and then it would only have to ask us when there is a new file. That way everytime I play something that is interlaced, the WD automatically outputs it in its native interlaced format, so the external VP or the TV/monitor can do the interlacing and then the upscaling.

Or here is another novel concept. Perhaps WD could offer an option in the menu where you can specify ahead of time what you want the WD to do when it encounters files of a various framerate/resolution. Like you could tell it that when the WD encounters any 480i file to send it out as 480i, so my external video processor can deinterlace it and upscale it, rather than the WD.

If you encounter a 720p file, you could choose to send it out natively, or perhaps you want the WD to upscale it to 1080p before output.

Whatever is the best way to implement this, since WD did not offer a sophisticated zoom (with finer increments) at least they could automatically output a 480i/480p signal so people with Samsung TV's for example could use the zoom on their TV without having to go deep into the settings to manually force a 480 output.

My Samsung plasma, which I have since gotten rid of, could not zoom when fed a 720/1080 input. The zoom would only work for SD content when sent 480i/p.

So, since the zoom on the WD was so mickey mouse and not very useful, I wanted to use the built-in zoom of my TV to crop some of the bars. I had to manually go into the menu and change the settings to 480 to activate the zoom on my Samsung. Then when I was done watching that file, if I wanted to watch an HD file, I would have to manually go back into the video settings and change it back to 720p output or auto.

Major pain.

WD better implement at least some of these features or do a proper 24p or they are not getting another cent out of me.

I'm not upgrading just for DTS downmix and ethernet capability. I can convert files to AC3 for free, and even the old WD TV can do streaming via ethernet with custom FW.

I believe the retail date in EU is Oct 16th, a Friday (according to Komplett.ie anyways). That's probably more like it.

Oh. One more thing. Here's another novel concept for the whiz-bang software programmers at WD. Instead of just having the menu default to videos, like it did in later firmwares, after many complained that the first firmware defaulted to photos, how about actually giving the users a choice in the matter? Imagine that?

How about a simple option in the menu where you can select whether or not the the device on startup defaults to video, photos, audio, settings, folders, or whatever!

Imagine how happy we would all be if WD gave us a choice instead of deciding for us how things should be.

It's nice that it defaults to videos rather than photos, since the photo options on the WD TV are not very useful, and so I rarely even use them. Photo slideshows work much too slow.

But imagine if WD actually gave us the choice of having the player on start-up default to something else? Who woulda thunk it?

After I turn the unit on, and it defaults to videos, I still have to click the right arrow button a few times to get over to folders. I almost never use the recent or all files functions. How nice it would be if one actually had the possibility of going straight to your list of folders in your videos.

You know, I've never bothered to use the thumbnail features in the 1.02.03 firmware because I don't want to find thumbnails to use for every single episode of Planet Earth, or Rick Steves, or Art Wolfe, or what have you. I just want thumbnails for my folders view, so I can have one icon for Planet Earth, one for Rick Steves, one for my 50+ PBS Nature shows etc. You are forced to have thumbnails inside the folders when you choose thumbnail mode, and so I must resort to list mode, because that's the only way I can quickly find what I need when I actually get inside the folder.

When I click on any of these thumbnails, I simply want to display a list inside, since I may have 50 episodes, and I haven't bothered to come up with a thumbnail for all of them. So then I get those generic WD thumbnails, which all look identical and don't display much info, so then you have to wait until the info scrolls by, and it is just very difficult to navigate in a reasonable amount of time.

So, how hard would it be for WD to place another option in the menu, where the user can CHOOSE if he wants thumbnails for folder view, but list mode inside the folders. Or vice-versa, perhaps they want list mode for folders, and thumbnail mode inside the folders.

That shouldnt be too hard to implement, now should it?

"Imagine how happy we would all be if WD gave us a choice instead of deciding for us how things should be."

Interesting comment. Can you point out other similar media players that can do this? I'd like to look into them.

I haven't really looked very deeply at most other media players, because none of them seem to be able to offer what I require.

I have zero interest in the PCH or the new Seagate device, or devices such as these, because they lost my potential business the minute they made the device physically too large, in order to support built-in storage.

The beauty and simplicity of the WD is that it is very small, so it is highly portable. It will easily fit in a briefcase or a purse. it can be easily moved to another room, or to a friend's house, or on vacation, a business trip, or even your car, etc.

The Popcorn Hour is too big to ever take with you anywhere. The Xtreamer has a noisy fan, and they made it bigger to support internal storage. Stupid! stupid! stupid! If Xtreamer was smart they would offer a slimmer model without the option for internal storage and I might buy one.

Adding the extra space for an internal 2.5 hdd in that tiny box will only add increased heat, which will cause problems down the road!

256 GB flash drives are already available, and soon one would imagine 1 TB thumb drives will be offered for sale. In the not-so-distant future we will not even need bulky hard drives to carry around our content.

So it is stupid to only offer devices that are bulky and add heat by putting hard drives or optical drives inside them.

Even though the WD is made of plastic it is durable enough and somewhat classy looking. It is very small, and perfectly quiet. I even like the tiny remote, even though it's a bit toyish. It is small enough that it adds to the portability factor. If I want a fancy remote to use with the WD TV I can just use a Harmony.

Western Digital was also very smart to place one of the USB ports on the side, instead of cramming them right next to each other in the back, where no one can see anything. Also if you have a fat USB wireless adapter or fat flash drive, having the two USB ports too close together could be too tight of a squeeze and cause problems. Yeah, yeah, I know you can get a USB extension cable, but that's one more added hassle. Also, by having one USB port on the side, it's much easier to keep track of which cable you are unplugging, and what device that cable is hooked up to. With the devices that have two USB ports crammed right next to each other on the back, it could be confusing as to which cable you are unplugging if you ever want to disconnect just one of the USB devices.

So I give WD 5 stars for the actual form factor and chassis design of the unit. I couldn't be more satisifed. Small, perfectly silent and fanless, and classy looking. Well maybe an SD card slot right on the device would be kind of nice, but perhaps they just couldn't squeeze all that in. I am very pleased that they are offering component out on the new device. This was an oversight on the 1G player.

It's the user interface and functionality that needs some serious work. There are other media players that have this added functionality, but they all seem to be either too big, too ugly, too noisy (fans), and too expensive.

The WD TV has the most potential because it is one of the smallest, the cheapest, quietest, and the classiest looking devices out there, and from a Fortune 500 company as well.

The main problem is that WD has not hired enough software programmers to exploit to the fullest extent the true possibilities of their device. I am not criticizing the competence of their programmers. I'm confident that it is simply a problem of being understaffed. They need to hire a few more programmers to really fix all the bugs.

They have lost out on 3 or 4 sales from me alone because they won't fix some basic bugs and implemement some useful features. If they would have implemented some of the features/fixes that people have been begging for for the last 9 months, I would have bought at least 4 or 5 of these things instead of just one.

Of course the ultimate would be to make the unit open-source as much as possible so the community could do most of the work for them. That would be ideal. But most companies don't seem to want to go that route, and probably for some good reason unbeknownst to me.

Geeeeez! Female?

I wish i knew the release date for this thing. Amazon has no date on there.

Do you guys think this will come this year at least?

Yes, they will want to hit the market for Xmas gift season.

I have read somewhere that is supposed to, otherwise it will not downmix DTS.