First of all, I love(d) this product. Enough so that my recommendation has caused 4 other people to purchase it.
I really wish I hadn’t upgraded to version .17.
I had 0 problems with the previous version (.11 or .12, can’t remember).
Now:
Trouble finding network shares
Some videos that used to play fine, now pause… stop… skip…
I wanted to point this out to increase the voice of customers that are having issues, and to encourage WD to get a fix out out sooner. I’m really tired of my wife telling me that I have to do something about this.
#1) I could not reproduce any issues with .17 - The .17 does not introduce any new bugs, it is only essentially an update to the updater for future upgrades. I have extensively tested all formats and networking, not a single problem here.
#2) You should have no problem downgrading firmwares simply update manually
I do not recommend downgrades - stick to .17 it is safer, for new upgrades to come.
If you are having issues it certainly isn’t caused by the .17 firmware.
Let me explain you. It seems like video decompressor has a kind of memory leak, because the same file, wich was played fine one time could stuck when you try to play it again. If you’ll try to play this file again and again it could stop to load at all with message: “Could not play this format”. After full reboot with disconnecting a power line the very same file plays fine with noe error messages. But that could happen again after a while. I’ve experienced that on different files with different codecs (AVI, MOV with XviD and H.264) and it occasionally happens on all of them but files with HD increase the probability of the “denial of load”. So why I consider it as memory leak: supposedly HD files require more memory for decompress and memory allocation problem could occure sooner.
I’m newbie here and have no experience with firmware other than 17. So Is it OK what I could not obtain AC3 5.1 DTS signal through HDMI or this is this particular version’s “feauture”? My WD unit is connected to TV set through HDMI, and the audio receiver is connected to TV set’s output with optical SPDIF cable. I have same configuration with all my other devices, including cable box and DVD player. It is very convenient because requires just one cable per each device and TV set works as digital audio switch for all of them, so I can swich video and audio sources with just one button on a TV remote. And it works just fine, I have DTS output from all of the sources except WDTV Live which plays all video files with plain 48 kbps pcm stereo.
17 has been just short of a complete disaster. Just short of making this a brick. I have reset to factory defaults and everything recommended, but it’s a paperweight most of the day. The device comes up, but cannot find any network share. If I try to play a video from an external hard drive, it frequently locks up and only comes back when powered down by unplugging it. I’ve had some borderline passable performance playing from a USB flash drive stick, but otherwise this “upgrade” has really been a floater in the punch bowl. When is the next release to undo all this damage?
I had previously been at .11 and could access my network shares easily and playback was a breeze. The online content worked much better, and performance from usb devices was also crisp. It is not all in our heads. Whoever was doing the testing either has a magic device or the test script was lacking. After the device reboot, it was very obvious that something had changed for the worse.
I am new to WD Live Player, but I would like to say, I have 0 problems with this device, aside from the known “Youtube account reboot”. What ever format I drop to it, it plays.One rule from all my pc experience, I always reset to defaults after firmware upgrades. I never use Internet or wireless to flash firmware, I always use the local (usb) approach. Regarding shares, I am in Windows 7 and I just add the “everyone” group account to the shared folder to be shared and that’s it, this devices discover it like a charm. No problems here. Not only that, I can be re-encoding movies on my pc and playing a movie at the same time while sharing the network connection. I am using .mkv format (handbrake).
In other words, I have 0 troubles with this firmware .17. Don’t know if there are different hardware revisions, but this device it’s great!!.
