I’m an engineer. I work with engineers. We love this kind of stuff and often times buy gizmos on the recommendation of fellow geeks like ourselves.
In the case of the WDTV Live… I have several friends at work who would love to find a device that handles their music, photos and video well without having to run upnp servers, etc. A number of us have upnp servers setup and deal with the idiosyncrancies of these setups because nothing else has arisen to replace them up till now.
I actually informed several of my coworkers of my WDTV Live purchase in advance and they were rather interested in how well it worked.
It only took about an hour of testing (the fully updated WDTV) to figure out that the WDTV Live is NOT a network media player. It may be a decent network video player as some here seem to find it great for that purpose but it took very little time to find that it falls flat on it’s face with music. WDTV Live lacks basic features and includes show stopper bugs like not playing the first couple seconds of any audio file. This makes it clear that this product is half-baked at best.
So… what happens? I return my WDTV Live and you lose multiple sales because you release a product that simply fails the basic tests. I didn’t even attempt networking connections. I figured I start with the easy local storage setup. How did this even get through QA? This is what happens when you outsource your firmware guys… just guessing.
Bye…
