*Official* WD TV Live Streaming Media Player Thread - Page 64

Power line isn't going to work for high bitrate files. I would recommend hard wired with Cat5e or Cat6 cable. I've tested power line connections with a 300mbps rated on, and none of my HD movie would play without stuttering.

Bizarrely enough, our Boxee will pull my MKV BR-D rips across my powerline ethernet with hardly a pause or a stutter. None of the other devices I tested would do it.

That's not universally true. It all depends on the wiring track and whether it crosses poles in the breaker box. I have four PLA's across my house. For the PLA's that are on the same pole in the circuit breaker box I can easily get more than enough bandwidth to stream the highest bitrate BD rips (42 Mbps) over SMB. For the PLA's that cross the poles I have to use DLNA (much lower overhead than SMB) and am able to still play the 42Mbps titles -- SMB across the poles stutters.

Does anyone know what make/model device the SMP emulates when programming a Universal Remote? No chart I have ever seen has a section for Media Players.

 

I'm sure something like Harmony might have a decrete selection... but what about something like an Universal Remote that might come with an Onkyo HTiB or a Uverse STB remote? My brother is finally getting UVerse and he wants me to help him consolidate remotes in 2 rooms (he has 2 SMPs).

That's like asking "How fast is a car?" The answer to which is "It depends on the car." Similarly, the answer to your question is "It depends on the file."

As a VERY rough estimate of the required AVERAGE bandwidth, take your file size (in bytes) and multiply by 8. Divide that number by the duration of the file (in seconds.) Your answer will be bits per second.

In general, your network needs to be at least two to three times as fast as the answer you get.

Guys, does the WD TV Live player play any .FLV files at all?

Thanks

Boxee being my primary player, I did not get chance to play with this player so far. Today i tried to play some bluray iso files like harry potter series and it had trouble playing each one of them. I was however able to play MI-Ghost protocol with DD tru-hd passthru to my receiver. DD tru-hd lights go up on my receiver, which is a good thing. But wd smp had trouble playing harry potter blu ray iso's. Any tips/tricks??

I've tested verfy few flvs and not all would play. It depends on the codec inside, h264/AAC seems to be ok, VP6 not so much.

You have given no information from which anyone could base help on. Please define "blu ray iso's". Are these full disk rips you made or main title rips? Were they compressed or ripped as full bit-rate? Did you make them or did you obtain them elsewhere and have no idea how they were made? Then define "had trouble playing".

I have all 8 Harry Potter BluRay titles ripped to my NAS and they all play perfectly through the WD Live players I have.

In general, BD ISO playback is problematic.

The WD lacks playlist interpretation like the BB has. For BDs that have LOTS and LOTS of TS files, (Think AVATAR Director's Cut, or whatever it's called), it takes my WDTV almost 2 minutes to start playback because it's trying to figure out which of those bazillion TS files has the movie inside.

IMHO, Your best-bet for trouble-free BD playback is to rip out the main feature into a single TS or M2TS file.

I have a convoluted (but free) way of doing that;
RIP using DVDFab HD, use BDInfo to parse the Playlists to figure out which one is the main movie, then use TSMuxerGUI to rip that to a single M2TS.

Do you add the extra step with DVDFab HD in order to keep an ISO as well as the single M2TS?

Bill

I tried both full disc and movie only options with backed as full bit-rate. These discs came from amazon.com

DVDFab just to copy it to local disk for further processing.

Before I had the live, live + connected with WD Element 1.5TB. They had the feature I liked the most were when I rejected HD, powered off, they turned off in few seconds later.

Gave them away for relatives and replaced with the WD live streaming. Played it the first time yesterday since had it. The led kept flashing forever after I rejected HD and powered off unit. I had to unplug the HD. Firmware was latest.

Is unit like that or I am missing something?
Edited by AVS66 - 7/2/12 at 7:42am

@AVS66
I haven't tried a USB drive on my Live-SMP but I suspect it is because when you push the power button briefly the unit goes into standby and not off. If the standby condition keeps the unit live on the network, then it will keep the attached HDD powered up so it can be accessed. Try pushing the power button and holding it until the Live-SMP turns off. That is a true power-off and should shut down the USB drive.

This really shouldn't be a problem with a WD Element USB drive because I believe they spin down and go to sleep after 10 min of inactivity.

kELSON,

So you are saying power off the Live is only in stand by mode. I have to hold the power button in order it off completely? Thanks. Will try later today.

Yes, that is correct. Standby mode lets the SMP "startup" very quickly since it doesn't have to do a cold boot -- I love it. It also keeps the SMP live on the network so you can access it with a PC and do file management tasks to an attached HDD. The down side, I guess is that it doesn't put the attached HDD to sleep.

Justpicked up one of these players primarily to stream netflix and hulu using a lot less power than my xbox. I also have a small collection of .mp4, .mkv and .avi files on my buffalo nas that so far have seemed to work quite well.

My problems so far have related to audio. I had the Live SMP hooked up to my marantz 7001 AVR via HDMI initially using pass through auto detect. Even though this receiver is DD only (does not decode DD+), I was pleasantly surprised to find the Netflix 5.1 titles I tried lit all all 6 channels on the receiver and seemed to work fine. Unfortunately, when I try to watch a Netflix title with stereo sound, I get no sound whatsoever. Hulu and local media files seem to play stereo just fine. I looked at the receiver and the PCM input indicator light was blinking when playing a netflix stereo track which I assume means something bad. The auto detect feature indicated that I had 7.1 channel LPCM, which I am supposed to, but I tried changing this to 6 and 2 channel with no change in my ability to hear stereo sound from Netflix tracks.

At this point I figured might as well try toslink since I have a spare cable lying around and initially it worked beautifully. I got DTS audio from an mkv file and both 5.1 and stereo sound from Netflix titles depending on their audio tracks. Victorious, I turned the device off and proceeded to gather the family around the projector. After showing off for an hour or two, I turned everything off. When I turned it back on later, all of sudden the audio would drop out on all material (DTS, DD 5.1 and stereo) every few seconds. I did some reading at it seems that the optical jack on the WDTV is a little finicky so I tried wiggling the cable and succeeded only in completely killing all sound from the toslink cable. After several power cycles and more plugging and unplugging of the cable at both ends, still no sound from optical.

I've switched back to using HDMI, which still works for everything but stereo Netflix titles. Anyone have any suggestions for how to either get stereo to work through HDMI or get the optical out working again? I ordered another cable just to check that, but otherwise, I don't know where to start. Thanks.

My TV is a 1080p Samsung LCD and the WDTV is connected via HDMI.

If I have the WDTV Screen Size Calibration to 100% the WDTV UI is full screen, but when I play a video it goes into what I call "overscan", the top, bottom and sides are beyond the edges of the TV.

If I set the Calibration to 95% the WDTV UI has a black border around the edge and the video fills the screen 100%.

Why is this? Is it possible to have both the video playback and the UI at 100%?

BTW, this is in direct contradiction to the user manual, which states:

Indeed! This is a good thing; many people have complained about this for a LONG TIME that the calibration only seemed to affect the UI and they constantly had to tweak video zooming.

At least with MKV and M4V files I tried, I have no missing pixels. But I do see it in WMV files...

What kind are yours?

This particular file was an MP4 with AVC video. A different MKV with x264 video played fine

I did a factory reset and now everything seems to be fine at 100% setting!

I am currently using a WDTV and use the 'List mode' (no thumbnails) to display file content.

Does this (new to me) player have a list mode to display files?

I have no use for thumbnails and prefer to display my content in list mode with just the titles listed.

Thanks

You can use ThumgGen to create a jukebox. Or if you don't like a complete jukebox you can use ThumgGen to create poster.jpg files of your movies as well. Here are a few movie wall I created with ThumgGen:







Poster wise it should look similar to this (this Zappiti):




Here you can see several ThumbGen screen shoots:

http://thumbgen.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53&Itemid=61

GusGus....

I don't want any type of photo or jpeg.

I want to have my media listed by title only, like in Windows Explorer.

I am using Power line adapter connecting to WD TV. 1080 files are not playing properly with this setup. I brought Synology NAS next to WD TV, still have issues. Can i connect both using USB cable, so it will work better as both are connected directly?

Electrician quoted me $520 to have wired connection for three rooms (one upstairs, other two are adjacent).. he said he will run the cables from outside of the house.. It is very expensive for me.. Pretty much I cannot run a cable within the house without digging holes.

Just about to buy the WD TV Live Hub 1TB, had few questions in mind and would be glad if someone could ans;

1. Does it have an option to select aspect ratio?
2. Would it support Turtle Beach PX5 wireless headset?
3. What benefits could be availed by installing a custom firmware?

Thanks in advance,
Jeet.

New Firmware out. Version 1.10.13.

Regards,

Lt. Dang

Yes, that popped up last night when I turned on the player. Didn't have time to install it then, we wanted to watch something. Perhaps tonight.

Aspect ratio for the UNIT: Yes. Aspect Ratio for VIDEO PLAYBACK: No.
What do you mean, support it? The WDTV doesn't care what's downstream. The question would be whether your PX5 supports the WDTV's output formats.

Custom Firmware: No such thing.

Appreciate your reply. Thanks! Bit confused when you say video playback: NO? Unit: Yes? Would appreciate if you could explain that. My Turtle Beach PX5 supports Dolby Digital, Prologic IIx decoders...not sure if that information is helpful enough.

Thanks for all the help.
Jeet.