Western Digital - WD TV Live Media Player (WDTV2) - Page 236

Seriously, compared to DTS core is it really that big a deal for more than just a few. How many people really have the high-end equipment to hear a difference. Is there another sub-$100 player that has all the features of the Live and does DTS-HD?

If WD could figure out a way to trick everyones receiver into displaying DTS MA I think it would satisfy the vast majority.

And they wouldn't know the difference.

i finally got one and i've decided to never attach another hd to it unless it's formatted ext3. during playback of a movie it lost connection and then remounted the "dirty" drive. in doing that it destroyed the mbr and made all my files 0kB. i had to reformat the drive in order to get it back to 500GB (got screwed up and was only 127GB). it's good as a streamer, but i will not use it to directly connect an hd again.

i've also ended up getting a sony gtv. hoping this one has a better ntfs driver.

Got what? Did you buy a current Live-SMP or one of these old WD Lives that are the topic of this thread.

I've had 4TB disk volumes attached to the Live-SMP without issue.

Your wrong, they would carry on about how much clearer and detailed it is than lossy.

Sad but true.

It's not just about lossy vs lossless. Certain HD audio has 7.1 channels too. With more channels, you get better audio separation & surround sensation.

sorry, it's the smp. i'm sure that had i never had that one error i wouldn't worry about hooking a drive back up. i always make sure that i dismount an ntfs drive from any of my media players before unplugging them or running checkdisk if i happen to it by accident. but this is the only unit out all the linux bases devices i have that actually dismounted, remounted, and then killed my content. when i used to run a hackintosh i recall not being able to mount a "dirty" drive until i ran checkdisk on a pc first. i forgot the ntfs driver that i used.

it would be a non-issue if it were my fault for remounting the drive before checking it, but it as all done automatically, it may never happen again. but i sure won't be taking that chance. anyways, i've taken a liking to plex and since the wd tv smp doesn't have a native plex app i may be getting rid of it. the smp isn't a bad device, i actually really like it, but i don't think i'll have a place for it for a while.

At least no in this thread.

Hi,
After reading all weekend and learning about media streamers I'm ready to pull the plug on the WD Live (runner up is popcorn A400). I have just a few questions regarding the user interface.

I'm mostly interested in the WD live ability to play backed-up movies in MVK format and my personal videos from a NAS server (looks like synalogy DS413 at this point). Will these be displayed in a movie wall fashion by the WDTV?

I have hundreds of family video clips. How are they going to be organized on the WDTV menus?

As you can see by my questions, I'm very much interested in the WDTV ability to display my content in a simple interface.


Your comments will be greatly appreciated

This thread is for the older model - imo, the interface for the newer model is much nicer.

BTW, I'm still having issues seeing my Win7 shared directories. Everything was fine until I upgraded the firmware, now it doesn't see any of my machines. I turn it on/off a few times, sometimes that works. Other times, I go into network settings, disable "automatic log onto shares" then re-enable it, and then it sees the computers. I've done nothing to my computers or to my router (which assigns the ip addresses.) It always sees my Silicondust network tuner, so it's not as if it cannot see the network or get an ip address.

Anyone else have this issue? It is currently useless to everyone else in the family because it can't see the movies.

It has played .mkv perfectly fine for me as long as the video doesn't have PCM audio. For some reason, it just won't work. If I put it in an .m2ts container instead, it works every time.

Not sure if they'll display in a wall fashion.





Why not just put them into a folder to organize them?

No problem. I'll try to help as much as I can. I joined this forum mostly because of the lack of support over on WDTV's forums for this product.

Would you mind posting a link to the thread for the newer model?

As I understand it, the WDTV Live Gen 2 IS the newest WDTV Live.

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1364999/official-wd-tv-live-streaming-media-player-thread

The latest WD TV Live is the Gen 3 WD TV Live Streaming Media Player. It came out about a year or so ago.

Not happy with the new firmware update. I used to be able to play ALL files from the Video section, now it won't let me play audio files unless I choose audio. Other than that it seems OK.

Thank you. Apparently I have the Gen 3, not the Gen 2 since I bought mine about 4 or 5 months ago.

well, crap, don't i feel stupid for posting in the wrong thread. sorry guys.

Works for me on 1.13.18 and with PCM 2.0.

If still high def audio a no go?

Anyone tried the iOS app? Mine will show the movie names and even show the counter but no video or sound.

I don't even have equipment that can decode DTS-HD Master Audio. On paper, DTS-HD MA > DTS 5.1 because DTS-HD MA is a lossless codec, where DTS 5.1 is lossy. Can I hear a difference? No. I'm also using cheap headphones and on the TV, I have an older receiver that can do DTS and DD both in 5.1. DTS sounds louder, not necessarily more detailed.

Now between PCM and DTS/DD, the difference is night and day. With PCM, the separation is just better, there's noticeably more detail in the sound, too.

I still re-encode all my stuff to BD9 size and use DD 5.1 @ 640kbps as it sounds good enough for me and it's an acceptable tradeoff between quality and file size. Any lower than BD9 and the video starts to look like crud, and lower quality audio just makes me cringe.
Edited by hogger129 - 3/1/13 at 10:44pm

Guys, I have a hard time playing flv files downloaded from youtube.

SOME of them do play but some don't. Is there anything I can do to convert all the flv files to something that this unit CAN play?

I can upgrade but I LIKE my little WD TV Live. To me it's pretty much bulletproof and simple enough for me. I tried the streaming unit and didn't like some things they changed
and I tried the Aios but it kept locking up on me.

Thanks

George

One option would be to transcode to a different "format" and hope any incompatibilities get washed away in the conversion. Handbrake is a relatively easy-to-use no-cost transcoder that runs under Windows, Mac OS, and Ubuntu. There are lots of user options, however, so Google around for a tutorial. Handbrake's GUI has a batch mode option so if you have a lot of files to transcode, you can queue them up and let it run overnight. Other folks may point you to different transcoders.

if you find Handbrake useful, please consider donating to their Sourceforge project (link is on their website).

p.s. I assume these are older videos ... I didn't think FLV was being used by YT anymore.
Edited by hydrogin - 3/10/13 at 11:02am

Thanks. Another problem is that I have no idea what settings to use (if any)...?

I just looked at Handbrake and I see that the output options are MP3 or 4.

Here's the thing. I tried Any Video Converter but when converting from flv to mkv, avi or mp3, the file size
want from 5 megs to around 13 megs.

So, I figured since flv seems to be a very small format, can I convert with something to a DIFFERENT flv setting or something
so that I would get the small filesizes while still retaining decent quality?

Keep in mind that most of these clips have crummy quality anyway so it's not like I'm trying to retain blu ray quality here or something.

Sound is more important than video.

Thanks

George

I've never used Any Video Converter so can't comment on it. But in any transcoding process, there are a lot of details that could have produced "poor" results.

FLV is just a container that can hold audio and video that's been compressed with any number of codecs. Even though FLV is an older container, I believe it can hold videos compressed with the H.264 codec ... which is a modern codec that produces relatively high compression for the same video quality. But FLV can also hold video that's been compressed with an older, less efficient codec. Long story short, you should get good compression results using an .mp4 container and the X.264 codec in Handbrake. I would not expect any "inflation". It's going to come down to which settings you use. And the higher the compression, the longer the transcode will take.

Post a link to a YT video and I'll give it a try when I get home.

Thanks, I'll find a couple that WD doesn't read and I"ll let you know where to get them.

It'll be a couple of days though. I tend to procrastinate the hell outta everything