I bought a WD TV Live yesterday and had problems playing from network shares right out of the box. Video plays fine from USB or when connected via wireless bridge. I upgraded to the latest firmware and got the same symptoms. These symptoms exist on any and all video playback, including low bitrate stuff.
Just before giving up, I decided to _downgrade_ to the earliest available firmware and guess what- video plays perfectly over wifi on the old firmware.
Does anyone out there have an idea of what’s going on with the current firmware that would cripple the performance of the box when using wifi? All firmwares show that the signal is very strong. It’s almost as though processing the wifi signal is taking so much CPU that there’s nothing left to decode video- that’s how it looks anyway.
Again, playback is fine on 1.04, freezing and stuttering on 1.06 and whatever the current one is.
Has anyone seen these symptoms before? I couldn’t find anything quite like this after a bit of searching. Any advice would be appreciated. I’d really like to be able to take advantage of some of the features on the new firmware, but I can’t afford to lose the wifi functionality.
I have the same problem and use firmware version 1.04.22. I really cant understand why they dont release the firmware they have been working on the last 8 months. I really hope they fix all the bugs we have reported all this time.
I’ve made a bit of progress on my issue, in case it helps anyone else suffering the same symptoms.
As far as I can tell, it’s related to the Media Library functionality- when I turn the Media Library off completely, the box works relatively properly. It seems that trying to index a network share bogs the Live down enough to completely kill playback, which I find a bit disappointing. On the older firmwares, when you have the Media Library set to “only when inactive”, it doesn’t try to index while you’re watching. On the last couple firmwares, it seems to start building the index randomly no matter what you’re doing unless it’s explicitly set to “off”…
Needless to say, I haven’t even seen what the Media Library looks like, but other than that the Live is working pretty well. I haven’t even looked yet to see what chipset this box is using, but you’d think that whatever OS this thing is running, playback would be set at a way higher process priority than file indexing or anything else this box can do. On the new firmware, it looks like Media Library takes the lion’s share of the CPU time and the video gets whatever’s left…
