*Official* WD TV Live Streaming Media Player Thread - Page 69

I have bought three refurbished WD TV SMP units over the last year for myself and gifts and have been very happy with them.

I have 6 WD green drives, including an original WD10EACS from 2007 and a couple more from 2009, and all are going strong. I did replace one 2 TB drive, and they sent me a new one. Out of the several dozen HDs I've had over the years, I've received one refurb from Seagate in RMA, and it worked fine for the several years I used it. I can't recall ever having to RMA a replacement drive. As for your warranty claim, that's nonsense, too, of course:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1058/p/227%2C294/c/122
In an Advance RMA, the replacement drives are shipped with a 90-day warranty.

If the remaining warranty on the defective drive is more than 90 days, the remaining warranty will be applied to the replacement drive after we have received the defective product.

I got my WD TV Live SMP last week. It's my first media player and it's a bit of a brave new world for me. The first day or two, it was freezing up all the time. I had a drive hooked up via USB with a complex structure on it and it took a long time to inventory the drive, and apparently didn't like trying to do anything else during that time. I've since gotten rid of everything on the drive except my media in a very simple folder structure, and it's working much better. It's actually a fabulous little device for the price and I have no huge beefs with it.

One problem I ran into is files it refuses to play. One is a .mov and one is a .mp4. The SMP says the video codec for both is MJPEG. That seemed fishy so I checked them with ffmpeg and Videospec. ffmpeg says they both have video codecs of h264 (avc1); Videospec says H264/MPEG-4/AVC. So they basically agree, and MJPEG I think is very different. Apple devices play these files, so I don't think they could be MJPEG.

Why would the device be so wrong in getting the video codec? If they were MJPEG, I could certainly understand not playing them. But they are not, I'm pretty sure.

**Edit** I found out if I wait a little longer, the WD changes its mind about what the video codec is, it shows correctly, and then it can play. Strange!
Edited by Glorious Flower - 10/9/12 at 5:34am

This is an old question, but looks like it never got answered, so . . .

I think the audio quality is excellent. I use the optical audio out to my audio amplifier. When I watch a video file that has DTS audio, I am amazed at the quality.

The WD TV Live SMP itself is silent. It's a little unit and as far as I know there is no fan inside. The only sound would be your USB drive if it has a fan. That's the same setup I use, and my USB drive has a fan, but I don't notice it.

Jim

How rude.

I've probably RMA'd more disk drives than you have ever owned.
Perhaps you should qualify your statements with "in my experience, I can't recall ever having to RMA a replacement drive." and skip the name calling.

When you finally do RMA a drive, go online with WD and plug in the new serial number.
I have found to my chagrin, the WD online system only gives me a 90 day warranty on what was formerly a 3 year warranty.

As always, mileage varies by individuals.

Qualifying with "in my experience" would have been redundant as I was clearly relating personal experience. One could tell this by my extensive and consistent use of the pronoun "I". It was actually you who made categorical statements, including "For drives such as the Caviar Green, they simply do not survive past their warranty period, which is now 3 years, IIRC," to which I presented a counter-example. Do you often falsely accuse people of that for which you are guilty? That's what I call "rude".

As for "name calling", that occurred only in your mind, much like your bogus claims about the warranty. It seems likely you didn't understand the terms of your RMA, but it's puzzling that you quoted my link and excerpt from the WD KB yet ignored it in your reply. It does refute your claim, you know. For that matter, I don't know of any warranty for any retail product bought new that works as you described. Maybe if you bought refurbs or some other unusual offering, what you say could be true, but for people buying new drives from Newegg, Amazon, and all the usual places, the warranty works as one would expect, not as you have described.

Has anyone had issues with not being able to delete a video file on their PC after having played the video file on the WDTV Live SMP?

It appears that the file ownership gets corrupted and Windows states that it is "unable to display current owner".

For example, I have a video file shared on my Windows Vista PC (let's call it "Some.TV.Show.S03E02.mkv"). The video file shows up just fine in my Media Library on the SMP, I play the file to completion, and then go back to my PC to delete that episode ("Some.TV.Show.S03E02.mkv").

The file will not delete. Sometimes I get an error from Windows stating that I don't have permission, while other times the file will disappear from the explorer window as if it has been deleted, but if I do a refresh or browse back to the folder, the file is there again. Also, at this point, I can no longer play the video file with VLC on the PC either.

Right-clicking on the video file and selecting 'Properties', then the 'Security' tab, shows a tab titled 'Owner'. It states "You do not have permission to view this object's security properties. To view its security properties, you can try taking ownership of the object. As the owner, you can also control who gets permissions on the object. Please not that once you take ownership, the previous owner might not have access to the object."

Below this it has:
Object name: Z:\Media\Videos\TV Shows\Some TV Show\Some.TV.Show.S0302.mkv
Current owner: Unable to display current owner

It then has a box to "Change owner to:" with choices such as 'Administrators' or 'My personal account'.
When I attempt to change the owner it fails with the following:

"Unable to set new owner on
Some.TV.Show.S0302.mkv
Access is denied."

Any ideas what is going on here? Somehow the ownership of the file is being cleared, so from Vista's point of view....there is no owner at all. This doesn't happen every time I try to delete a file, seems to happen maybe 1 in 20 times.

Connecting to attached USB drive from computer - password

I am able to connect my computer to a drive attached to the WD TV Live SMP when there is no protection. It is glitchy and I usually have to completely power down and restart the WD in order to connect to the drive each time, but I can do it.

But when I use the option to add a password (and enter a password complex enough that WD will accept it), how do I use that in connecting from the computer? What should the username be? I haven't been able to connect when there is password protection.

Thanks,
Jim

I've seen this with local files on USB HDDs. It helped to manually eject the drive, then the files could be deleted under Windows.

I have no idea what you're doing.

I just turned on password protection on mine, and it asks for both a User ID and password -- and both accepted "simple" input-- no such requirement for "complex" input.. I just entered "aaa" and "aaa" and it works.

You don't mention what OS you are using, but it sounds like the file permissions on the files or folders are mixed up.

Apparently I had no idea what I was doing either. I just saw that it did ask for both. Must've missed that. Thanks for the replies.

Firmware 1.11.14 (9/6/2012) and PCM audio issue

After I updated to firm ware 1.11.14, videos with PCM audio now play with no sound.
Does anyone else have the same problem??

I need some help getting thumbnails to show up in the main library. I got three movies to work but none of the rest are working. I used this site to get the thumbnails. http://www.impawards.com/index.html . I put the jpg image and the mkv movie into a folder and named the folder the exact same as the jpg image. I also named the mkv movie exactly the same except it says mkv at the end instead of jpg. In the image below you can see that three worked but none of the rest.



When I go into the Avengers folder the thumbnails are there. See how I named it the same as the folder.



Then for the mkv movie itself I named it the same except it's mkv at the end.



What am I doing wrong?

I don't know why it's working for some but not others, but just a tip - things seem to work better when you don't have every movie in its own folder. It seems the WD scans them faster and it is easier to browse if they are all in one folder. It might solve your thumbnail problem too.
Jim

Good tip. Ill try that. So instead of making a folder for each movie Ill just leave everything in one folder. All the movies and all the jpg's in one big folder.

I wouldn't suggest to put everything under one folder unless you will never buy a different media player such as Dune, PCH, Mede8er, Popbox. I've got every movie and tv show under its own folder and I've never had issues. As a matter of fact it is easier for third party jukeboxes such as Zappiti, Yadis, YAMJ, YAMJ to Mede8er, ThumbGen, etc to recognize and scrap the movie correctly.

WD media player are probably one of the worse media player for scrapping movie / tv shows. I know because I used to own one. Rather than using the WD to scrape movies / tv shows. You should use ThumbGen to do that for you. WD media player will pick up on the files and display them.

It worked but now I have two thumbnails for each movie. One is the the jpg and the other the mkv.

I'm going to try Thumbgen next.

Regarding the last few comments, i'm assuming you guys are using that "media" option with the WD. I've never used that and always use the "Network Share" option to get back my listing. So that uses SMB and as far as i can tell, that does not use any indexing. It's a straight read from your source. And it's fast. If i drop a movie in a folder, it's immediately available.

I have my source structured like so:
I been doing it like this for over a year with no problems. Admittedly, I don't care for thumbnails, synopsis and whatever else. I just want a fast way to get to stuff and start watching.

EDIT: One thing i forgot. Doing it like so, the view will show the thumbnail if one is available. All it needs is the image to be named [movie-filename].jpg.

You can modify ThumgGen to only scrape the files that you need. I used to use ThumgGen before when I owned the WDTV2 and an AIOS. It works well, but it is a long process since I did everything manually since I wanted everything to be 100% correct. My folder set up is similar to Lordhits.

I've got a one folder in my unRaid server that holds everything name Media.


Media>>>Movies>>>Avatar (folder)>>>Avatar.m2st(folder structure)
Media>>>TV Shows>>>True Blood>>>Season 1>>>>True Blood SxxExx.mkv

I use ClownBD + AnyDVD HD (encryption removal) to rip my movies to BR Folder structure
I use MakeMKV for DVD Movies and DVD TV Shows.


I never had a problem with ThumbGen to scrape my information, with the exception of TV Shows where a little bit more complicated. I would suggest to go to the WDTV Forums. They've got different skins / movie wall options. You can have something that looks like this:


Edited by GusGus748s - 10/15/12 at 11:11am

Wal-Dog... You're using PS3 Media Server? You're not going to be able to do ANY of what you describe -- DLNA servers don't have that flexibility.

You need to use Network shares.

Still don't get the point of having a separate folder for each movie. If you think 100s of movies in one folder are too much, why not use genre folders?

Some third party jukeboxes require for each movie to be in their own folder. The same goes for TV Shows. They need to be in a main fold with season x, and SxxExx.file extension in order for the program to correctly scrape the information.

I am in a process of building a theater room in my basement. Waiting on projector still but have started to run a/v equipment.

I have a wd live. Is that all that is needed besides some hard drives to get this outcome.
Meaning how that avatar is displayed and tells you everything about the movie etc etc. the interface

You need to use ThumgGen to scrape your movies. I would suggest to here: http://thumbgen.org/ and learn how to use it. There are other jukeboxes that are easier and faster than ThumgGen, but you will need a different media player in order to be supported. I use Zappiti for my Dune D1 and YAMJ / AEON for my PCH-A210.

Hmmm I am looking for something I can hookup a few hard drives to just to store blurays.

But want that fancy interface as well

OK, maybe individual folders are the way to go. The part I find confusing about the WD system is there are some very different ways to get media into it and organize it, and the experience is different for each one. I started with Media Library off. Then I would go in through the Videos tab in the home screen, and choose Local Storage (a USB drive). That's where, if I recall correctly, I found I had to navigate in and out of each folder to check out the movie. But I could be wrong about that. I since got rid of the individual folders.

Now I'm experimenting with the Media Library. It's pretty cool when it works, having the extra information and backdrops and such. But I'm experiencing lots of glitches. It often says it can't compile the Library because it can't save stuff on the drive. Sometimes it says I have no media in a folder, although if I choose Local Storage instead of Media Library, it can then see all the movies in that folder. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

The ThumbGen screens I've seen on this forum are awesome. After many years, it's the first time I've wished I had a PC (though I'm a happy Mac user) so I could use thumbgen. Anyway, I'll wait until I understand the Media Library stuff more before trying to get into that.

This will work. I put movies in their own folders as an organizational thing. So all it's related content is in one place (subtitle files, images, whatever else).

I went with a different look for my WDTV sheets they arent perfect but I am pleased with the results. Running the b-rad firmware and using thumbgen as well as modifying the "glass sheet extra" a little bit, below is what I came up with. The black box at the bottom has 5 movie names listed. Since I use TVersity to aggregate and share the movies I don't get thumbnails but honestly I don't mind at all and if needed down the line will be easy to create at this point. You will also notice the correct AR in the box and not just 16:9, those all had to be done manually, not sure if that has changed in a new version of thumbgen or not.

Bill