Couple of quick questions

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

I have a couple of questions concerning the WD TV Media Player plus system. I have had mine a few months now and am very happy with it. I have a Seagate Free agent 1.5 TB drive and is almost full of Videos, music and pictures, thinking about expanding my space by purchasing a WD 3 TB drive to replace my Seagate drive, my question is and I have read all the post concerning the single drive being over 2 TB and some are complaining it doesn’t see some files or corrupting their drive or worse damaging the videos. All my videos are in either an AVI or MP4 format. (Also forgot to mention the other USB connection is being used for the wireless Internet connection) so I only have one USB connection for a single drive. The other question I have is, what software are most people using to rip their DVD collection (copy guarded). I did some research and have downloaded DVDFAB 8 and Open DVD Ripper 2 and have had a lot of luck with these two software’s. Very good quality using both software’s. The DVDFAB is faster but cost a lot more than the other and you only have a license for 1, 2, 3, 4 years or lifetime and Open DVD Ripper 2 is a onetime charge and is a lot slower but both do a great job of ripping and removing all copy guards. I did notice the Open DVD Ripper 2 did rip the DVD Rango where the DVDFAB didn’t. Wasn’t sure what type of copy guard it had on it. I want to rip my entire DVD collection and copy them on to my external drive so I want to be sure I have room. Also thinking about running CAT5 Ethernet cable to my WD TV Media Player and that way I have a little faster streaming speed and open up a USB port on my device.

What I really want to know is how many people use their system and what software they use. Not using a Shared Network drive, I have an older PC running Windows XP and get most of my videos from a friend that downloads them from the internet. I really love this media player and I’m always looking at this forum for ideas. Thanks again for reading my rambling.     

2

Yes, the original and older firmwares couldn’t properly handle GPT hard drives (GPT is necessary for any drives above 2TB, but drives under 2TB can be formatted as GPT instead of MBR as well) and if you tried to use a GPT drive, it either wouldn’t work at all, or the contents could be corrupted.

However, that was patched in 1.05.  Since then, all I’ve seen is users report that their >2TB drives work fine… I’ve not seen one user report any corruption issues with the patch.

However, there seems to be an issue in 1.06, (can’t really call it “new” because a similar thing was happening under the 1.04s) where some users’ drives, of any size, are not getting seen.  So, at this point I can’t guarantee that a 3TB drive you bought would be seen, but I’ve not run into the missing drive problem myself.

The other thing is, even though USB hubs are not “supported” in terms of using more than one DRIVE per USB port, many users report no issues in using a hub, i.e. have the hub on one port and have a USB wifi dongle, a USB keyboard and one USB drive all connected to the single port.  So a USB hub may open up your second port so you can attach a second drive.  However, if you were going to try it, I’d buy from a place with a decent return policy, and if that particular hub doesn’t work with your WDTV (since nobody can guarantee that it will, but it does seem likely) just return it.

I believe when most people say they use “DVDFab”, they are actually using the free “HD Decrypter” that falls under the DVDFab banner, and not the paid version.

I’ve certainly not had issues with it, but that doesn’t guarantee it will work for all discs.  But it tends to get updated, so a new scheme that “didn’t work” a while ago, may be rippable now or in the future.

Yes, running a Cat5 line would free up the one port from needing the wifi dongle, but it depends on several network conditions as to whether you’d see any improvements.  I have an ancient router, and I don’t get any better speeds with my 10/100 wired connection to my LAN (and thus to my PC) than Tony does with his wireless-N connection, at least in terms of file copying and all that… mine should stream slightly better but I’ve never directly measured it.  So, if you’re getting poor wireless speeds (due to many possible issues) then a wired connection could improve it, but if you’re getting blazing wifi traffic already, wired might not necessarily get you anything drastically “extra”.

3

Thanks Roofinguy,

I do have a USB dongle and I’m currently using it for the wifi & keyboard, I’ll try another smaller drive I have and see if it works later this evening.

4

I’ve just bought a WD TV Live for viewing films and have it connected via a hard drive USB docking station. this allows me to use internal drives for storage. I also have a hot swap hard drive dock in my computer in order to switch out internal drives for backup or additional storage purposes, this does away with the need for power supplies for external hard drives. You could buy two hard drive USB docks, one connected to the WD TV, the other to your computer for convenience instead of continually transferring it between machines when a drive is full. The docks are fairly cheap at around £25 or so apiece from the likes of Maplins then buy additional internal drives when they become full.

5

The USB hardub works great for the wifi, keyboard and hard drive. Now I have two hard drives attached and I can see everything. Very happy.

6

Glad that’s working for you. :smiley:

The one thing I should have cautioned you (or anyone else reading this) about, though, is power…

If you have an unpowered hub, and connect a USB-powered drive to it, the possibility exists for the drive to not get sufficient power and become corrupted.  If the USB hard drive is externally powered and/or the hub is externally powered, you shouldn’t have any issues.