Maybe the reason that WD ignores most of the posts on this forum is that the chip manufacturers design and manufacturer chips compliant to internationally recognised standards and WD as a business are not going to waste valuable time arguing with non-technical people who refuse to read the specifications of the product or user manual.
I used to work in the electrical/electronic servicing industry; I spent many hours explaining to consumers that their product will not function the way they want it to function and the functionality of the product is clearly explained in the user manual.
It never ceases to amuse me the amount of people who critique electronic products without understanding the design concept behind the product.
The following statement is repeated on this forum and many other forums on the internet.
“I can view the video on my computer but it does not play on my streaming device.”
There is a big difference between professional digital recording and broadcast video using dedicated hardware chips and processing the same video on a computer using software codecs.
Digital and analogue video is produced to international professional video specifications designed to be transmitted or played without any computer processing in the chain.
Computers process video by programming the CPU and GPU into mimicking a hardware video chip. That is why it requires serious computing power to process video. A hardware video chip contains NO computing power; it just converts an electrical signal into a visual signal without the requirement of a CPU or GPU activity.
There are four major manufacturers of streaming chips on the market. Regardless of the manufacturer, the functionality of the video streaming device is similar as the following.
The WDTV Live is a dedicated hardware video streaming device not a computer. The WDTV Live does not have the computing power to use software codecs to transcode and play computer bitmapped video.
The Sigma chip used in the WDTV Live contains a MIPS microprocessor, a basic GUI, I/O support and dedicated hardware video chips designed compliant to the professional international digital broadcast standards. The alpha numeric text is generated by a text generator chip capable of displaying text on TV screens.
Sigma and the other streaming chip manufacturers will not release the specifications of the hardware video chip. There are six commonly used digital broadcast standards. Therefore; it can be assumed that the Sigma chip contains all six dedicated hardware video cores and the microprocessor switches the digital video to the appropriate core.
A hardware video core is incapable of processing digital video outside its hardware design parameters. You will have to refer to the WDTV Live specifications and the publicly available Sigma chip specifications. That should give you the digital broadcast standards specifications.
All streaming chips on the market will reproduce professional broadcast standards video faithfully. I have conducted a number of tests with video on the WDTV Live box. If a DVD or bluray is virgin ripped to a hard drive that movie is still compliant to the international professional digital and analogue video specifications and will stream through the WDTV Live perfectly.
Video streaming chips are manufactured by the millions, maybe tens of millions. The forum posts on this site are not that high compare to the streaming devices in circulation.
People have to start taking responsibility, read the product documents and make a technically informed decision and purchase the product to do their particular job.
If people want to view processed video on a video streaming device then there is a high possibility that the video will fail to play correctly. That is not the fault of the video streaming device but of the software package. Until such time that software writers start understanding the way hardware video works and write their programs complaint to the professional international standards, then it will an ongoing complaint blaming video streaming device failure.
If people want to watch processed video, watch that video on a computer.
If people want to stream video through their homes; virgin rip the DVD or bluray to a hard drive and don’t process that video any farther.