Nice with a new update. But I haven’ t seen them ever adressing the biggest bugs in their firmware.
-The Live Hubs total lack of ability to play songs in random mode. Right now it only plays the same 50 (or so) songs closest to the one you started playing first in a more or less random order. So even if you have 1000 songs in the folder it will only play the same 50 songs over and over.
This should be an easy bug to fix. As it is now the live hub in itself is totally useless as a music jukebox. Until they fix this I would strongly suggest anyone who plans on using the hub for this purpose to stay away.
-It would also be nice if the box were able to create playlists, and recieve playlists from external programs like Twonkymobile.
-I see that they have improved something about the search function. But after the update mine is still unable to find anything no matter what you search for. When I hit the “Submit” button nothing ever happens. I will try to completly rebuild the media library and see if that helps, but am quite sure it will not do anything.
-The hub is also sometimes unable to see new files added to it’s internal drive. They wount show anywhere unless you switch the media library off. Then they will appear. But it’s really unpractical to keep switching between the two modes like that.
-I also think that the onboard harddrive is extremly slow. Copying files from my laptop to it takes ages even if the hub is hardwired to my router. I have also tried to copy files from the same laptop to other network harddrives and a media center and that takes only a fraction of the time. And don’t ever try to extract a zip file stored on the internal drive to the same drive. This takes so long that you will save a lot of time moving the file to your laptop. Extracting it there and then move the extracted files back to the device.
-The device also moves extremly slow through librarys with a long pause for each time they load a new screen. So if you have more than 100 files in a folder you can just give up on accessing more than the first 100 files cause it takes too long. My ultracheap mp3-player have no problem scrolling through hundreds of files in a few seconds.
-The hub also keeps stopping playback in the middle of some video files that my media center have no problem playing from end to end. I have to find out where in the file it stopped, then manually skip to a few seconds later in the file to resume playback.
-I have managed to get an external keyboard to work with the hub, but only the letters. The arrows and enter keys wount work. So I have to use the remote for that. Mayby this is supported in other external keyboards, but am suspecting not.
The only thing the update did for me was adjusting the brightness of the screensaver so it now looks washed out and ugly. So if you don’t need any of the netflix updates I strongly suggest you don’t upgrade cause none of the problems I have had with the device seems to have been improved.
If they don’t adress some of the important issues with their firmware I am just putting the whole box away and going back to my media center. That took a long time to start up but at least it worked when it had booted.
I really don’t see why they are not able to at least fix the easier bugs like make a random/shuffle-function that actually works (every single other mp3-player, dvd-player, pc, mobile phone etc I have ever had has been able to do this with very limited memory and cpu). Then I would be willing to mayby forgive the general slowness of everything about the whole device. If you control it via Twonky server on a mobile phone your actually able to find and play the files you would like fast. But it would have been so nice to be able to also control it directly…