Western Digital - WD TV Live Media Player (WDTV2) - Page 222

Matt: Streaming movies will be a hit or miss if your network is shared with other computers in the house. Internet traffic, downloading, etc. and mixed with your streaming can hit a speed bump. I've had experienced a few times when watching a streaming DVD movie and it began to stutter. Other times, I can watch a 1080p mkv file with absolutely no problems. If I were to show a movie to friends, I would definitely watch it from a local USB external drive plugged directly into the WDTV Live.

My network is pretty much the same all the time. I have 2 computers on 24/7 and the occasional laptop, plus about 12+ net enabled devices all but the laptops hardwired. This is constant and there was no additional load when the box froze up.

Plus, the WD would not respond to the remote leading me to think there was an issue with it, not my network. In testing I was able to easily stream two DVD movies at a time, but 2 blu ray movies not so much, so I know the limits of my system. I know if I went with gig switches I could stream 2 BR streams, but I have no need for that.

Except the WDTV doesn't have a gigbit port, so it'll be the bottleneck. I do notice that network streaming does cause some lag in the remote and sometimes takes awhile to switch folders. As for hard freeze-ups, is your WDTV Live unit placed in a well vented area? Is it sandwiched between other equipment? Does it feel too hot?

I'm having an issue with the latest firmware. Every time I boot it up, I have a purple tint to the entire screen. I'm running it to my TV via a HDMI 4x Switch. I read that it's an issue for some on the wdc.com forums and that rolling back the firmware was a solution. Is there an alternative solution before I go that route?

I'm really starting to get sick of the issues with this thing (only had it two months). This combined with my displeasure at discovering it can't handle AAC audio (in .mp4 containers) has really got me thinking about upgrading to the PCH A-210.


EDIT: Found the setting to change Video to RGB High. At first try, I got the "denied" red no symbol when trying to access this option but just tried again and it worked. Hopefully the setting will stick.

I just downloaded and installed the new firmware tonight...and for the first time in the year and a half that I have owned my WD TV Live...it actually works like it's supposed to. That kinda shocked me, but it's really nice when it works.

How long should the Media Library scan take? Mine's been going for more than an hour... I've got probably 20gb of FLAC files to scan -- does that take a long time? I had done a scan a while ago -- should I delete any old library files?

Anyone? lol The media scan is still running (three days and counting). It appears to have worked -- it's sorted my music files by genre, artist, etc. However, the USB light on the front is still blinking and I get a bar across the top telling me it's still scanning. Is there a way to end the scan?

Looks like they added Best Buy's CinemaNow with the new firmware.

Has anyone tried it yet? Quality report?

Added: New firmware still doesn't play m2ts files from my Sony XR550V camcorder

if you don't need the search functionality, you can disable the media scanning.

Yeah, but I actually do want the search/sort functionality.

I was hoping it would something simple like deleting a .db file from the USB drive and re-scanning...

Surely one of these files in the ".wd_tv" folder is where the Media Library info is stored? I'm wondering if deleting the right one and then rescanning will cure it...

I am not sharing the external drive with the WDTV Live in Read/Write mode, just R/O...
In this way , I don't have those useless "sorted" databases.

Screw it then -- I'll just delete the entire ".wd_tv" folder and start from scratch. After all, that folder wasn't there when I initially plugged the drive in the first time, so what could go wrong!

So did the scan complete this time? I only have videos on my USB drive but I can't imagine 20 GB of flac files would take more than a few seconds or minutes. Certainly not an hour or more.

You know, it was actually a corrupt file that was causing it to hang (and to make the WDTV very laggy in general). Once I deleted the suspect file everything returned to normal.

I'm using B-rad's latest firmware. For some reason, I no longer see the external USB drives attached to my WDTV through Windows Explorer. I used to see them and could copy files directly from my computer to the WDTV USB drives. The WDTV just shows up as a Media Server, but doesn't show the drives.

Sorry for posting the obvious…
If you roll back to a WD firmware, and see if the problem goes away, you might confirm a bug in B-rad’s fw, which would help him and others too?

Current and older WD firmware can be found here;

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/...-or-wd-tv-live

EDIT: Yes (onlysublime) talk of custom firmware issues should not be posted here. I checked out that link that onlysublime posted below, and because it seems old & abandoned, I thought I would post another (even better) location for those interested in B-rad firmware.
-> http://forum.wdlxtv.com/

there's a separate thread for unofficial firmware:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1100062

I don't think it would be wise to pollute the main thread for the WD TV Live with unofficial firmware. It's already unwieldy to find information in this thread already.

And to get back on track, I'm really liking the new firmware that WD just released. It fixed the audio/video sync problems on a couple of files I had and it offered some new features as well.

There is a file I have where it was encoded very high (even lower end PCs choked on the video) and before when I tried it on the WD TV, the video would lag far behind the audio. Now when I play that same file, the audio and video would stay synced but in order to do so, it seemed like it was skipping frames so that the video could keep up with the audio. So it's not an ideal situation but at least it's watchable. Luckily, only 1 video I have has this behavior.

There's even a seperate forum for the unofficial firmware.

Yes, the latest 4.31 firmware finally fixed the mildly annoying bug I had with the sticking info bar. The information bar no longer sticks on the screen after a pause, FF or RW operation -- it turns itself off after a couple seconds.

The only other bug I have observed has to do with subtitles. I have the default for subtitles set to "off", yet I will get the occasional occurrence where the subtitles are turned on at the start of a movie. It's not reproducible by title, it just happens every now and then. Nothing serious compared to the people who have stuttering .VOB playback.

Mmh, on the official forums people complained about the opposite. Despite subs being set to on they have to be turned on manually for each file during playback.

if a person wants to guarantee default subtitles, they should use mkvmerge and set the default track flag for the subtitle track to "yes". since then, every movie that has subs will play automatically. not a single exception. i did that for all my movies since my dad likes subtitles.

i also set header compression to none for all my movies as well. it's an easy process that takes seconds. yes, the header compression bug was fixed for the WD TV Live. but the amount of space you save by enabling header compression is so minimal. plus, my first gen WD TV will never get a new firmware so might as well remove compression.

try accessing the harddrives from your pc and delete the wdtv folder

Several problems with that solution:

• Despite the default flag being set for track 3, track 1 gets displayed automatically!
• internal subs come with persistent issues
• MKV won't do for people who like to stick with ISOs (which have said problems)

do you have multiple subtitles? in that case, you should reorder them so that your most desired subtitle track is above the other tracks. and remove the tracks you have no desire to keep.

you should always order the tracks according to your preference. for example, putting the DTS track above the AC3 track.

can you explain what a persistent subtitle is? you're linking to your own post.

It's not a persistent subtitle but a persistent problem. Since 1.0 these bugs existed and they still persist after roughly 15 firmware updates. Also I do want several sub streams per file (german forced, german, english, english director's comment) and reordering is only a workaround. The flags are there for a reason and WD should support them.

ordering is not a workaround. it's not a bug. the WD TV does not have a drop down menu to select a track. it cycles through tracks in a specific order by pressing a button on the remote. unless you know another way to choose your audio track or subtitle track or video track, cycling a specific order is the way the WD TV works. regardless of what you set as your default track, you still have to cycle through all the tracks in order to access all the tracks. so you might as well order your tracks according to your preference.

on or off is a default setting. by its very nature, being first on the list of anything is the default first choice. You load up a DVD and chances are, it starts the movie at chapter 1.

the flags do work. I can have a subtitle automatically on by default or automatically off by default. because of how I set my preference, I always get the subtitle I want to be on default.

If you're willing to set the flags, how could you not want to do the ordering which is just as simple?

Of course I can cycle through streams, that's what I do on my standalones. Still it's a bug to ignore a flag that tells the player to display stream 3 instead of 1. And as I mentioned before, on VOBs/ISOs one has to manually switch on subs despite default being set to on.

This one has me stumped....I tried to play a movie encoded in mp4 the other day and it wouldn't work. So then I tried some others and they didn't work either. The thing is, I have watched them on the Live before. I haven't updated the firmware since I bought it in late 2009. The movies are on the same hard drive and plugged into the same computer that I've used previously. All I get is a notification on the screen that the format is not supported and to check my manual.

what about adobe flash media server 4?thats good for live concept, have you guys tried?