*Official* WD TV Live Streaming Media Player Thread - Page 4

That's always been true for the Live family. The specs show there are separate NTSC vs. PAL models for the n-Live, the Live+ and the Live Hub.

Having said that, in the manual it notes there's a reset button underneath the unit which, if held for 10 seconds, swaps between PAL and NTSC.

See page 8 of the booklet (page 13 of the pdf):

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/librar...779-705062.pdf

It doesn't bother me - AV fans in the UK have had PAL equipment with NTSC capability for many years - but someone with a model in the states might want to give it a go.

Steve W

If you don't have a local hard drive attached will it still scrape for file info on whatever sources you have (nas, other pc's, etc...)? Slightly confused about the scraping. If it were to do that then this would make it a very appealing player. Otherwise it would be slightly less appealing. Does it support idx/sub subtitles? I assume it doesn't have a fan?

philip

I have all of my films in their own folder and with a jpg attached.

If I 'scrape' will it delete these, or replace them, or what?

Steve W

Nope network shares do not work with scraping your content to the library but raphaelwd on page 2 stated they are working on this. Scraping currently only works with USB HDD's.

That's a great question as I have put alot of time into getting my poster collection together. When they do implement this on network shares I hope they have this in mind. Maybe later today I will put a couple of movies on a USB HDD and see what it does if I already have a folder.jpg there and let you know.

Updated:
When I scanned a thumbdrive with The Time Travelers Wife on it, it did not delete my folder.jpg. It looks to store thumbs in .wd_tv/thumb on the root of the drive in 7 different sizes. In the movie folder itself it added "The Time Travelers Wife.metathumb" which is the movie poster and a folder called ".The Time Travelers Wife.backdrop" which contains seven backdrops and "The Time Travelers Wife.xml" which contains all of the movie info and then seems to link to the following for thumbs and backdrops:


http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/c0c/4d6b7b997b9aa132fe000c0c/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/02a/4c92a9e15e73d62ffb00002a/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/4c2/4bc9617b017a3c57fe02c4c2/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/fee/4d7a76397b9aa11a14000fee/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/cf8/4d605cf77b9aa154cf003cf8/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/842/4caadd407b9aa17aca000842/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/160/4cadd09b7b9aa11b3d000160/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/ed4/4daad2d75e73d634b4000ed4/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/762/4dd667ae7b9aa147d9000762/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/1b7/4df22a315e73d642b30011b7/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/233/4e4c0d675e73d64c37000233/the-time-traveler-s-wife-cover.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/4ba/4bc9617a017a3c57fe02c4ba/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/4ae/4bc96179017a3c57fe02c4ae/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/4b6/4bc9617a017a3c57fe02c4b6/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/4b2/4bc96179017a3c57fe02c4b2/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/4be/4bc9617b017a3c57fe02c4be/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/041/4c9427107b9aa10d5a000041/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg
http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/03a/4c9427437b9aa10d5b00003a/the-time-traveler-s-wife-poster.jpg

It left my folder.jpg untouched. I have to say I am really impressed as it lists all movie info, has a nice poster and then on top of that scrolls through 7 backdrops on the selected movie.

Update 2:
Some good news, I copied over "The Time Travelers Wife.metathumb" and ".The Time Travelers Wife.backdrop" and "The Time Travelers Wife.xml" to that movies folder on my NAS drive and then went to network storage and found that movie and clicked on it and to my surprise I was presented with poster, movie info, and backdrops. Please note that the only way I could get this to work was by switching views to the one where it lists all your movies at the bottom of the screen and you scroll through them left to right. It seems half broken though as you get no info until you press enter on the folder itself, just highlighting the folder gives no movie info in the fields above.

I'm curious... what was the version that was SHIPPED on your device? 1.03.10 definately disables the MEDIA LIBRARY for NAS boxes (and thus the Dashboard). I watched netflix all night last night with no issues at all..



They are all multi-standard. It's just indicating which standard is active when it comes out of the box... The mode can be changed by pressing the reset button for 10 seconds.

It's been like that for every WD TV box made...

No, it won't scrape NAS...YET. It will in the future according to WD. I can't wait for that, I hope it's not too long!

Yes, it supports SUB/IDX (aka VOBSUB), and no, no fan.


I know for a fact that it won't replace XML that users generate themselves.

I had hundreds of movies that the HUB scraped JPGs and XML for, and those are IMPORTED instead of REPLACED. But I don't know what happens if ONLY the JPG is present.

Many thanks.

Can you clarify, when you say "...I was presented with poster, movie info, and backdrops" do you mean moviesheets?

Steve W

Basically looks like a movie sheet to me. The backdrop pic changes to a new one every couple of seconds. Here is a somewhat crappy pic to give you an idea...

wow. exactly what i am looking for. i got some covers for each movie i painstakingly downloaded for each movie on one hdd. but might be tempted to move some movies to a ext hdd and then back if it gets me the info like that. most nice.

that worked very nicely. transferred two movies to an ext hdd and hooked that up to the media player. let it get the content info. then hooked it back up to the pc and transferred just the content info back to the pc. selected those movies one at a time and the content info was there. now how bad do i want this content info. idea is to take out the hdds one at a time and hook them up to the media player in a ext case to let it get the content info for all the movies. hmmm...

I was thinking of getting one of these before i leave vegas for he UK today but the UI was th only thing i wasnt sure about, i have been using XBMC on my apple tv and love the movieshee style look

As the ATV wont play my 1080mkv rips this looks like it may be worth a go for $99

I will be hookin a usb drive up so will the movie sheet as above display from the USB drive or will it have to be via network, also will it collate this info autonatically or is it manual?

It will automatically scan a usb HDD and pull info, backdrops and posters for you. In settings just make sure media library is enabled and the get info option is set to automatic. You can set it to manual as well if you wanna do it on a movie by movie basis.

nfodiz, thanks for posting that screenshot above, that looks pretty impressive. I'm just wondering how it handles TV Shows.

from what people are saying, it will do the same thing with tv shows. there is a tv database as well. would be nice to see that as well. might have to xfer a season to my ext hdd and try it out.

Many, many thanks. This is great news.

It doesn't impact on me - if I buy a disc I know what it says on the back before it arrives from Amazon; if I didn't know that know much I wouldn't buy it. But Me Julie has asked for this facility several times. I'm not going to tell her - it'll be a nice surprise.

How long does it take to 'scrape' (for example) 1tb's worth of films? Oh, and if it makes a mistake when I scan the whole lot, can I individually re-scrape' single titles?

Cheers.

Steve W

It does TV shows pretty well. It gets the info from www.thetvdb.com.

It expects the files to be named in a specfic format, something like

Star Trek.S01E01.mkv

or whatever. I haven't experimented with them, but WD says they're very XBMC-like, so the naming conventions for XBMC probably work here, too.



Well, size isn't as important as quantity. 1TB could be at most 30 Bluray disks, or it could be 1000 MKV files.

It scraped a whole TV series for me in about 10 minutes it seems (about 200 episodes), but it may have downloaded the whole database and then chewed it up. A disk with about 20 movies on it took only about 10 minutes, too.

you can re-scrape a movie individually if you highlight that movie and hit the Options button on the remote. then choose Get Content Info. You can rename the file or such and choose the correct movie if need be.

Oh, and by the way, it also supports XML and NFO formats (as long as the NFO extension is changed to XML.) Not all the tags are supported, but a number of them are... so a good chunk of the third-party tools will work, too.

I exchanged a different wdtv live and upgraded to 1.03.10. Netflix is now working.

why did they disable media library for NAS?

Come on folks!!! At least bother to test the file-format support before you attest to what a great machine it is- I got mine today and I can say other than the nice interface and Netflix support this thing is pretty buggy.

It can't play back FLAC/AAC surround audio in an .MKV file. Defaults to 2.0 stereo (if it outputs anything at all). Big problem there.

It can't play back from DVD-Rom/BD-Rom data disks. Sure, not a huge problem, but some of us like to back-up data on DVD-Roms/BD-Roms. I don't understand why they won't support external DVD-Rom support if they support external USB HD support?

That and a lot of other little errors. The lack of AAC/FLAC surround support really kills it for me though. I'm seriously considering returning it now.

Edit- Through more testing I see I got it partly to work in some files to decode multichannel AAC/FLAC but it just doesn't work. It either cuts out or the picture starts to stutter- it's pretty much unwatchable.

Maybe you should have read the specs first? FLAC of any form isn't supposed to work in MKV.

2-channel AAC on my box is decoded to PCM because my AVR doesn't decode AAC, and the audio setup wizard detected that.
I have a few test tracks for multichannel AAC and they seem to work OK, they seem to be sent as 2channel PCM. I can't tell, though, because my AVR doesn't indicate how many channels it's receiving with PCM...

Hello all again. So what I have done is taken out the 3 HDDs I have in my PC that have my movies on them and hooked them up to the media player one at a time to update the media library. I seriously had nothing else to do tonight. So this was something to do. And it has turned out nicely. I updated the media library for each HDD. Then put all 3 HDDs back into my PC and booted back up. All the media library info is there still. While this is nice, I do know that when I get new movies I would have to take out the HDDs and update as necessary. But I will be fine with what I have now for a while. Just an FYI.

Yes, FLAC and AAC in an .MKV wrapper is listed in the posted specs on WD's site. There's a long list of specs not listed on the retail box on the website and that's one of them. It doesn't work at all- AAC surround in an MKV wrapper should work as it's been standard for years now and that doesn't work at all either. Both formats pretty much cause the box to choke.

Hi Dave.

I await the UK release so I can see for myself - until then I can only comment on what I see here.

Your complaints appear to about a lack of support for AAC/FLAC surround. You also don't appear to disagree that any of the featurss people have listed so far, and which people have been praising, don't really work.

As I don't have a single file in AAC or FLAC surround my comments would remain unchanged anyway.

I don't think you can criticise people for praising (for example) movie scraping, when the machine actually does movie scraping.

Does the old (previous) model support FLAC and/or AAC surround. If it does, then I'd expect this to be fixed pretty quickly. I'd get in touch with WD and let them know. If the old model doesn't support these formats, and no one here has been saying the new one does, I don't know how you can criticise anyone at this thread for not pointing it out.

I hope there's an update and your formats are supported soon.

Steve W

Thought I'd share my experience with this new device.

I have an older laptop that I use as a media center. It sits in a port replicator. I use DVI-->HDMI to go to my TV. I also use an MTransit device to get USB-->fibre audio to my reciever.

This has been my setup for 9 years...works perfect. Other than the fact you have to physically hit a button to turn it on (I always put it into sleep mode). I have a blutooth keyboard and mouse.

All my movies are on my office server. Laptop is hardwired ethernet.

Since it's so old...it simply does not have the guts to play MKV files.

I finally decided to get this a couple of days ago. Wow how tiny. Hooked everything up...and it sees everything on my Win7 server via Media Share.

Took me a bit to figure out why MKV files were't listed. Ahhh...turns out they only show up via a Network Share. Stupid. Now the fun begins.

I am pretty techie. I know my Win7 shares are setup fine. I even added Everyone with full control. The WDTV Live will NOT NOT NOT see my Network Shares. I spent a good 6 hours trying all the things I could find on the net. Reg hacks, etc, etc. Absolutely no go. Called into WD...useless.

I finally setup an NFS service on my Win7 box. Shareware...for 30 days so now I will have to pay for that. It worked. The WDTV sees the NFS and I can play MKV's.

BUT...I have 3 MKV files that I accuired for testing. One out of the 3 play. Two of them stop at the same spot and pretty much hang the WDTV. All 3 play perfect with VLC player on my Win7 box.

I am absolutely p!ssed. All this time and effort only to find that it's not that good with MKV's. I am not spending the time to mess with the MKV's.

This thing is going back. I will pick up a better laptop and continue what I have been doing. More money...yes...but truly works and plays everything.

Phew...that's alot. If anyone has some final tricks...I will give it one last try.

Other than that though...pretty slick. Small...remote...fast...nice GUI, etc.

Shame...B.

Hmm. Where are you seeing that? Perhaps their documentation is contradictory, but in the user manual, it pretty clearly states that the only audio supported in MKV containers is AAC, AC3, MPA, PCM, and DTS...

You might go over to the WD forum and post the MediaInfo for some of your nonworking files... See what those guys can offer. All I can say is my 2-channel AAC stuff is working fine.. (but I only have a few files.)


Wow. As Techie as you are, you should know that Windows doesn't support MKV files via "Media Servers" unless you install an MKV codec pack. It's a MICROSOFT limitation, not a WD limitation.

As far as your network shares, 10 to 1 you have a master browser problem on your net. At last count, I have five different servers on my net, running everything from XP to Win 7 in a Virtual Box, to three different Linux variants. Getting a functional Master Browser to work can be a challenge, but once you do, Network Shares are rock solid.

Some guy over on the WD forum wrote a Network Troubleshooting thread a while back; I'll see if I can find it and post the link.

As a techie...I may not know it all. But I DO know how to setup a share. I have one server. My 2 laptops, tablet, phones, etc see my win7 box no problem. Should this really be that hard? I feel bad for the folks who hardly know what a share is. WD definately messed something up...no clue what it is.

A bit of news.

Someone at the WD forums has said they've got the player to pass DTS-MA, all be it from a full BD-Audio ISO.

Steve W