Problem with Youtube HD Videos (1080p) after upgrading

We have official confirmation from the WD TV develop team that YouTube’s API does not support HD video.  Therefore, you will not be able to access any HD video through the WD TV Live’s YouTube interface.

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Bill_S wrote:

We have official confirmation from the WD TV develop team that YouTube’s API does not support HD video.  Therefore, you will not be able to access any HD video through the WD TV Live’s YouTube interface.

Feel free to jump in any time Bill with official news. Its getting a bit lonely here on our own. Perhaps you could feed back the sheer frustration to the development team. There may be somebody there who may have some empathy for the people who bought this unit and are spending valuable time and effort trying to make it work.

As am I.  I own one also.  But know for sure that the engineering team is aware of your (plural) frustrations.  They will do what they can, as fast as they can.  But, if you want proper testing done, it will take some time.  Unless, of course, you want to help test it. 

Bill_S wrote:

As am I.  I own one also.  But know for sure that the engineering team is aware of your (plural) frustrations.  They will do what they can, as fast as they can.  But, if you want proper testing done, it will take some time.  Unless, of course, you want to help test it. 

Put up beta firmware! We’ll test it!

(as long as it doesn’t brick us)

Bill_S wrote:

As am I.  I own one also.  But know for sure that the engineering team is aware of your (plural) frustrations.  They will do what they can, as fast as they can.  But, if you want proper testing done, it will take some time.  Unless, of course, you want to help test it. 

    • *> Yes please! Also it would be really great if you could put a blog or something where we could see on which bug fixes or features are developers working. It would be really helpful to know what we could expect or give suggestions.

Bill_S wrote:

But, if you want proper testing done, it will take some time.  Unless, of course, you want to help test it. 

As whattheheck says, as long as there’s a guarantee that it won’t brick the unit, I’d be happy to play with beta firmwares and report back on bugs.  

Does anyone know if this is any closer to being resolved?

When are we going to be able to se YouTube HD videos? :cry:

rucanunes wrote:

When are we going to be able to se YouTube HD videos? :cry:

You really must read the messages in this thread.

Bill_S wrote:

We have official confirmation from the WD TV develop team that YouTube’s API does not support HD video.  Therefore, you will not be able to access any HD video through the WD TV Live’s YouTube interface.

Can’t a firmware upgrade solve that?

It did: The firmware upgrade removed HD capability for YouTube, since YouTube does not want HD access for the WD TV Live. It’s not a technical bug, it is an intentional legal/political feature.

This forum has advice for downgrading the WD TV Live firmware, so if YouTube is more important to you than the other changes of the firmware upgrades, you can just go along with the old firmware and enjoy HD YouTube for now.

Otherwise, you can always write a polite complaint-letter to YouTube and discuss their policies with them, but it is not WD’s fault.

rucanunes wrote:

Can’t a firmware upgrade solve that?

Its all to do with youtube conditions. They don’t want TV boxes watching high bandwidth HD videos. WD have to meet the youtube conditions.

I believe you can watch youtube HD videos by ‘downgrading’ the firmware to 1.01.17.

Oh, by the way, forget downgrading. :cry:

Apparently YouTube now blocks any access through the old firmware. I had not tried it for a couple of days, but yesterday no YouTube video would play, instead it told me to upgrade the firmware. Eventually I gave in and upgraded. It kinda works now, but only in SD and only very few videos. Useless.

STurtle wrote:

Oh, by the way, forget downgrading. :cry:

 

Apparently YouTube now blocks any access through the old firmware. I had not tried it for a couple of days, but yesterday no YouTube video would play, instead it told me to upgrade the firmware. Eventually I gave in and upgraded. It kinda works now, but only in SD and only very few videos. Useless.

Who told you upgrade the firmware and when you say old firmware, how old.

I continued to use 1.01.17, since it used to allowe unrestricted HD YouTube access.

However, trying to view any YouTube video lately just produced a message saying somthing like that the API has changed and that there should try a newer firmware for my device. The dialogue also offered a button to start the usual search for a firmware upgrade, which then proceeded as normal.

So for me staying with 1.01.17 or older means that you cannot use YouTube at all. Well, it had to be expected that this move from YouTube would come, but I had hoped that it would happen somewhat later.

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STurtle wrote:

I continued to use 1.01.17, since it used to allowe unrestricted HD YouTube access.

 

However, trying to view any YouTube video lately just produced a message saying somthing like that the API has changed and that there should try a newer firmware for my device. The dialogue also offered a button to start the usual search for a firmware upgrade, which then proceeded as normal.

 

So for me staying with 1.01.17 or older means that you cannot use YouTube at all. Well, it had to be expected that this move from YouTube would come, but I had hoped that it would happen somewhat later.

 

 

Interesting to know that, thanks.

STurtle wrote:

 

Otherwise, you can always write a polite complaint-letter to YouTube and discuss their policies with them, but it is not WD’s fault.

 

I’d love to see what compelling argument anyone could come up with to convince YouTube that giving away mind-boggling amounts of bandwidth for free is a good business strategy. :smiley:

Unless they find a way of injecting unskippable adverts into the video stream (before / during playback), they will never give us “free” HD content.  

People seem to forget that YouTube is a business, not a charity.

Good to know they closed the 0.17 loophole, cheers for the heads-up.  

I believe the latest GUI changes to youtube also changed the file format of the streamed video.

Up until recently, I could go into my firefox internet cache and pull out the video file.  Rename it to something.flv and it would play perfectly on my Windows desktop or the media player.  Anything I have downloaded in the past few days no longer plays in the media player and the Windows media player is showing odd color streaks through the video.  It reminds me of the old macrovision on VCR tapes.  I wonder if youtube is trying to protect their content?

Try this: http://www.youtubedownloaderhd.com/

PixelPower wrote:

 

 

I’d love to see what compelling argument anyone could come up with to convince YouTube that giving away mind-boggling amounts of bandwidth for free is a good business strategy. :smiley:

 

Well, I strongly doubt that bandwith is a huge concern for Google. Google appears generally wasteful when it comes to bandwith. After all, why do they offer HD on YouTube at all? It is kind of silly, since I would guess that most computer screens are to small any way to make an impact (in physical size, not in resolution!), but then they ban from the big size TVs, were it would make a difference?

Anyway, Google sure needs to make money with YouTube at some point, no doubt about it. So I would rather guess that this is a licensing issue between WD and Google, i.e. WD would be required to pay more for an HD YouTube licences then for a SD one for their devices. Furthermore, it is surprising that they do not already insert ads into the streams for the WD TV Live et al, even though we cannot click on anything with the WD TV Live. However, I guess this would quickly kill it for me, as it did for free TV. Once one got accustomed to OnDemand-TV that can be stopped, rewound or fast-forwarded at any point, one gets spoiled. :smiley: Probably there are not enough YouTube-capable TVs or TV Set-Top-Boxes around to warrant much effort for now, so that why I meant making some (friendly) noise might help the cause.

True, that is all a lot of speculation that does not really lead anywhere, but things are surely not a simple as we conceive them to be.