So what do the thmers want or need from WD?

Some are clearly not happy and upset about the latest firmware bugs.

What do you need and how as we as users help things along.

End User  ‘Communication’ and ‘Honesty’ 
 would be a good start :neutral_face:

4 Likes

well, I am not a themer, but i think WD must show true respect .

Themers  are the (ONLY !) ones who really know the product AND know how  to give us customers a state-of-the-art user  interface.

Full and proper documentations, or atleast full discloser of what can be done now
 and without having to rely onthe great work Themers here had to discover.

I see no issue with what your saying.

Only limit on it would be when they couldn’t comment due to agreements with say the like of netflicks and the like.

But this is likely not going to have much if any impact on the themeing.

I have to agree with Joey, I am not a Themer, but a user, when researching what I was going to buy, I did my homework, it was the Themers brilliant work that sold me the WD products, I know they must put lots of hours in to perfect the work and I wont name all the Themers but I think we all know who I am talking about, please WD listen to the people who help sell your products, respect the work they do, we as end users do. To all themers, keep up the good work we all appreciate your efforts.

1 Like

ya you are absolutely right Daveart. Cool themes made me to buy wd live smp . 

+1

I missed a lot of things but I’ll say like Joey.

I really miss the creativity Dev, Joey, Tinwarble, Medic and so on brought to the unit. It was a barebone display that became spectacular with their graphic capabilities. So yes, they [WD] should have been more open on the subject and have more conversations on what could be done and what could not. The joy/love/praise some themers would have gained if some of their themes was available to download from the Hub


And frankly, I don’t want to be the bad guy or anything, but everyone that says that bought the WD for theming? Really? Until Tinwarble* started the trend in 2010-11, it wasn’t even an issue. There was a lot of more comparable priced unit that had theming support from the start (xtreamer in exemple) but the Live Hub was never one of them.

*** edited for correct information.

thegreaterikku wrote:

And frankly, I don’t want to be the bad guy or anything, but everyone that says that bought the WD for theming? Really? Until Joey started the trend in 2010-11, it wasn’t even an issue. There was a lot of more comparable priced unit that had theming support from the start (xtreamer in exemple) but the Live Hub was never one of them.

Really, so Joey started the trend before he joined the community on 1-05-2011.

The fact is that the first person who started theming was PsychoTHC, followed by myself and juliojs, Extremedigital, Firetix, zballz, Hell3bound

1 Like

I know, I know but, unless I am mistaken and please correct me if I am, it wasn’t until he first showed his work that theming became something else than just reworking the basic theme WD had (all of them which are still working like a charm with the latest FW) and started this whole “don’t upgrade to X version else it won’t work” debate which ultimately lead to now.

I didn’t have a Hub from the start and only looked around the forum a bit (so I might have overlooked something) and I really don’t want to say that everyone before him was irrelevent (too much respect for your work for that).

Nope, you’re wrong.

In all actuality major changes had been started well before Joey had started themeing.

This is when major changes were started to be played with:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/Mini-Theming/td-p/138902/highlight/true

This is Joeys first theme:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/My-1st-Live-Hub-Theme-Project/td-p/151136

Take notice of post dates.

Apologies then. It really looked like an upgraded basic theme so I didn’t count it.

I’ve edited the post to reflect the change.

Clearly we need a more clear set of instructions on how to theme and whats possiable from wd.

Nothing unreasonsable about that and some help from the coders to do as long as it doesn’t take away from the rest of the work also seems resoanble.

It only makes sense for wd to do so and perfect timing to do so with boxee angering it buyers in such a massively stupid way.

I do like your positive thinking. But


I doubt either is going to happen, it’s pretty obvious that WD do not want to get sucked into themes, hence the site change and all the other stuff we have read.

And have you not seen the size of some of these threads on themes, how deep does a Themer go, how much time does it take, and can you write a lot of it down in a manual, maybe the basics of what PNG = what screen, but all the XML code, don’t think so.

Clearly it would have to be the basics and then its likely any think you do because you enjoy it
hard work.

Postive thinking maybe but more iam just very stuborn and a tad driven.

As of this moment iam typing with two splints on my wrist due to damaged cartlige/broken wrist from a fall.

The same fall also ruptured a disk in my neck which has caused me to loose much of the feeling in control up to my elbows.

Massively frustrating but the surgry to fix it is easy enough and very high sucess rate.

This is of course on top of being diagnosed with hemochromatosis in july.

Life isn’t alwasy far so you can whine about it or put your head down and keep moving forward.

Also wd ha suspported thier products and lived up to what they clamied during sale so i doubt they going to toss a chance to improve the product for free.

Word of mouth affects how stuff sells and these days wd one of the top three.

This market is growing more and more now so why wouldn’t wd not want to give alittle help to those improving thier product for free.

Now you know why my spelling is so bad
lol :slight_smile:

WD did provide at one stage, provide a “Basic” Theme Manual for Download.

They “Pulled” the Download link quite a while ago.  Back then, i wondered 
 Why ?  

But, you can read it here, if you still want 


http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/WDTVLiveHub-ThemeDefinition-v1-0-Here/td-p/373315

The answer why the documentation and even the complete section 
/themes on the WD product page is not there anymore can only be that theming should not be promoted and pushed in marketing from WD.

I think with just that poor document (in version 1.0) it is impossible  to be able to create amazing themes 


But you themers did it !!

I am sure WD was and is really suprised of the fantastic results of the themes (compared to the original one).

It is a surprise for them what happened.

But they are not just proud of it 
 there is also some kind of fear.

Because really great themes are 



 showing how simple and boring the original one is


 very hard to give suppport to (impossible if the themer goes away)


 dangerous if there are copyright issues in the themes

to answer the original question


do we expect that they follow our lead? Of course not

do we expect that they make theming a priority? No of course not

but I would expect an open dialogue

so many questions why things have been taken away, so many questions about png, about thumbnail cropping, compression, memory issues, movie sheet trigger


give us a heads up like
 “hey listen we have renamed the page of the player
 we will release in 2 days
 be prepared”

Instead we find out the hard way, and it turns out nobody even knew it was renamed. Basic functions such as “skip time” got lost for several video files, external hard drive recognition took a hit, navigation got slower and on top of that functions been added that among round about 80 suggestions have never been suggested. This causes massive head scratching not only because nobody i know can follow this logic.

Support theming or not
 in an open dialogue we could elaborate a few things that have been repeatedly posted in our theme posts. I have learned alot about your likes and dislikes in my theme threads, i started to understand how you think and there have been a lot of patterns which I see ignored. We could have shared this knowledge and in my opinion it can never hurt to know what your customers want, because even if you don’t want to feature it there is another line you don’t want to cross in breaking it.

In all fairness, Bill tried with a particular issue, unfortunately i got sick during that time and the issue was solved by community effort. I wanted to mention that because I want to excempt Bill from the critique above.

Now we have atleast a starting point where we can hopefully get them to change thier methods .

More comunacation would make things easier for all.