Incredibly slow menu navigation and restarts while playing FLACs

Hi guys

I bought a WD live hub as Ads seemed very promising in terms of features and GUI. I use this player connected with my TV and Hi-fi system. What i really hoped was to navigate easily my Flac library (all file tagged) of around 70Gb. I transferred my files and waited media library to come up. The real issue is:

  • Navigation is extremely slow with the standard sorting option (covers interface / “all” option selected )
  • It takes even 3-4 minutes to navigate across menus and literally freezes if I start playing my Flac files.
  • A very annoying bug is that moving to previous page of the library (starting from the first page) the WD freezes and restarts! VERY BAD! There is no way to use standard displaying of albums and avoid this bug. the only way to have more speed and avoid this is to move at “folder” view with no previews ulness for the selected folder/album
  • I’m relly disappointed mostly because this is happening with an updated firmware

As a customer I WOULD NOT RECCOMEND this product because it’s definitely slow and full of bugs. I believe as a professional managment consultant that a company should not rely on communities to solve pre-release bugs! You should spend YOUR resources for new product development in order to sell a product wich is almost bug-free and really does what is advertised. Many companies are using the power of online communities like this not to IMPROVE but to SOLVE and i find this really bad.

HOPE you’ll fix these bugs and release As soon as possible a stable, smooth, enjoyable firmware! I’ll never spent a single minute of my spare time looking for this hardware to run properly! PLEASE SOLVE BUGS!

Have you tried resetting the hub by pressing the bottom button with a paperclip / cocktail stick. Press for about 4 seconds (no longer) and then release with the hub on and fully booted up. The hub will reboot. This sometimes cures problems particularly after a firmware update.

You can only call it a bug if it affects the majority of users, otherwise its just a fault with with your unit. My unit does not have this problem.

Sure i tried and it doesnt fix the problem. But i cannot believe it’s an hardware issue as it occurs only when using media library and it’s not happening with folder view. Thus there cannot be a corrupted disk part nor an hardware issue. Video playback which is quite more resource hangry it’s ok. It’s not a faulty device but a bug. Please solve it

First off, if things are indeed firmware bugs, most people that post here (like richUK) CAN’T solve it.   We’re not WD people, and aren’t the ones who work on the firmware.

Secondly, I just tried all three issues you listed in your first post, and I couldn’t reproduce ANY of those issues.

Finally, I’m not sure I understand what you mean about this community debugging pre-release firmware.   There is no (nor has there ever been) pre-release firmware for the Hub available here.   And this community is EXACTLY the place to deal with issues with pre-release firmware if it ever does come (like it has for the WDTV Live and Live Plus.)

There is undoubtedly something unique about your setup;  no one else has reported those issues you describe.

Three to four seconds to go between menus is certainly not normal.   It’s maybe a half second for me, and most of that time is waiting for the little animations to run.  

I don’t have many FLAC titles, but with the ones I do, not one of them crashed the hub.

And scrolling back and forth across the list Beginning/Ending boundary didn’t cause any reboots at all.

So, if it *IS* a firmware bug, and given that no one else has had the issue, it’s likely a very rare issue, and would not be surprising that the firmware testers at WD wouldn’t have experienced it, either.

I tried several combinations yesterday. Finally i found the hub is having the bug with grid option displaying and media library on. If i switch off media library it works fine and the same happens if i use the list view with media library on. I’m not a technician but i can reasonably infer that this slow effect and restart when browsing seems very similar to an excessive memory use when loading albumarts inside flac files. Indeed what it really takes a lot of time is to show albumarts as it reads those embedded as tags into the files. I’ve 217 flac albums which is a quite large collection so it may be an issue related with how the hub does the indexing of tags and albumart for these kind on files. I experienced a similar issue with nokia browser when it chrashes with very complex webpages and here seems exactly the same.

So i’m still saying it could be a bug related with how the software builds the index with large amount of Flac files. Using folder view in wich it displays folder jpgs instead of embedded photos is 10x faster. Ask me if you need more detail. I hope someone can solve it as flac are very common among audiophile / music lovers like me and it would be very disappointing to switch to other devices beacuse the hub cannot properly manage them. Thanks to those who replied.

Now that’s really good information.  :)

Here’s my advice:   See if you can narrow down the exact set of circumstances that cause the problem.

Like try REMOVING a bunch of FLACs until the problem no longer happens, then add them back until it starts happening again.

Then you’d know the hub’s Threshold, and when you call or write Tech Support, you can give them enough information to reproduce the issue in the labs, and hopefully get a fix going.

Out of interest, what size are the albumart images in the FLACs? (ie. filesize, resolution, dpi etc.).

Mr_Lazy wrote:

Out of interest, what size are the albumart images in the FLACs? (ie. filesize, resolution, dpi etc.).

That could very well be a problem, some people download cover scans and tag them without reducing the resolution!

I guess this could really be the issue, i’ve many files with very high resolution coverart tags. Do you think this may be the cause? What can I do to solve the issue? How much large should the resolution be?  

I use Windows media player to rip CD’s, it automatically create 3 hidden cover art images in the album folder using 200x200 and 75x75 pixels for cover art, but I prefer a little larger, so I download a bigger version and reduce to 300x300 pixels jpg, they’re suitable for most views and rarely takes up more space than 50 kb :smiley: