Good Bye WDTV

I won’t make this note a typical rant but it do want to express my disappointment.

After well over a year of frustration, I’m dumping my WDTV on eBay and replacing it with a better player.

About 3 years ago I purchased a WDTV (the original) to replace a defective 100 capacity CD player. One of the main purposes of both devices was to play background music. This was usually a shuffle of one particular genre. Both the CD player and then the original WDTV worked well.

However, over a year ago, I replaced the original WDTV player with a WDTV Live in order to avoid moving the hard drive for necessary updates. That was a bad move since both the “play by genre” and shuffle features work poorly on the WDTV Live. The “play by genre” (and any other “play by”) feature ultimately took me to only one album. In effect, it was just like a manual search for one CD to play in a single CD player.

In order to overcome this limitation, I moved all music files of one genre into one file folder and played that folder on a shuffle. That played songs from more then one album but the shuffle continually repeated a limited number of songs from that folder (I have about 2000 songs in the folder).

I originally reported the problem to WD tech support but was advised that the problem was a hardware issue and couldn’t be changed. (a rather poor and incorrect answer since it worked well on the original WDTV).

The issues were posted in the “Ideas forum” by me and others:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Live-Live-Plus-Ideas/Shuffle-and-Play-by-genre-issue-on-local-drive/idi-p/117114

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Live-Live-Plus-Ideas/Music-playback-by-genre-amp-artist/idi-p/19552

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Live-Live-Plus-Ideas/Play-all-from-genre-artist-etc/idi-p/25490

However, since the problem was identified many  software updates have been issued without a fix for these problems. Instead, these updates have fixed other issues and added, what in my opinion, are rather silly additional features. (eg. YouTube on the WDTV is a frustrating and useless feature).

I can’t understand this since a proper shuffle and the ability to play all songs in a genre is a fundamental feature of any media player.

Therefore, my patience has ended. The WDTV Live will shortly be history and will be replaced by a more suitable media player.

In addition, I’m a bit of a computer nerd. I’m in the business. In past, I have purchased and advised others to purchase WD products. I doubt that I’ll make similar purchases and recommendations in the future.

Good-bye Western Digital.

It is unfortunate that your expectations were not met.

Regards,

It’s unfortunate to start out from the wrong expactations. Albeit being a media player, the LIVE is clearly a player for video. Audio playback capabilities lacked convenience from day 1 and should never have any consider it a decent player for this purpose.

My WDTV Live is history but out of curiosity, I checked in on this thread.

Techflaws says “the LIVE is clearly a player for video”. Empirically, this now seems obvious.

However…

The WDTV box is labeled “HD media player” not video player.

The WDTV Live web site says " Play videos, music and photos"

The specifications indicate the capability to play  " Audio - MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS "

The User Manual describes the playing of music including the shuffle and play by genre.

Therefore, it was reasonable to expect that the WDTV live would play music, play by genre and  do a proper shuffle as does every other media player that I have experienced.

I’d like to get a refund from WD but I knew that this would have been impossible.

dss_cottage wrote:

My WDTV Live is history but out of curiosity, I checked in on this thread.

 

Techflaws says “the LIVE is clearly a player for video”. Empirically, this now seems obvious.

 

However…

 

The WDTV box is labeled “HD media player” not video player.

 

The WDTV Live web site says " Play videos, music and photos"

 

The specifications indicate the capability to play  " Audio - MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS "

 

The User Manual describes the playing of music including the shuffle and play by genre.

 

Therefore, it was reasonable to expect that the WDTV live would play music, play by genre and  do a proper shuffle as does every other media player that I have experienced.

 

I’d like to get a refund from WD but I knew that this would have been impossible.

Dear dss_cottage

A smart Decision. :smileyvery-happy: Western Digital promises much and holds few.  I use now a  A.C. Ryan PlayOn! HD2 . It works good. Moderators and Developers are very nice and not  arrogant. :wink:

And what about users? Are they as arrogant and full of empty promises like you? You keep posting here despite claiming time and again that WD lies behind you. If only.

Say what you want Techflaws.  I’m 44 years old,  and my wdtv live is easily the most unstable, and dissapointing electronic product I’ve ever owned.  WD needs a new slogan “Buy it  now, we’ll fix it later”.

I’m almost 40 and i’ve seen a lot too. : )

Hope you are right with “we’ll fix it later”, gobey, because it maybe looks like WD wants to torture it’s customers in the dark instead of making them happy.

I mean how hard could it be if you have known hardware to code for?! The WD TV Live HD is not a PC with different components in various combinations, it’s the same hardware in every living room. The basic features should really work flawlessly but somehow they’re messing things up in every firmware version. Ok, there are many differnt TVs, harddrives, memorysticks and networks getting connected to this little box but if it works once, why did they brake the working parts?

The hardware is still ok i would say, it’s just the software that really messes it up.

At least WD is brave enough to run a forum like this. People who are able to play media files should be able to find this forum using an internet search engine. Obviously it’s bad publicity for WD, so let’s hope they use the feedback to get things done. It would be a real delight to read for example: “Yes, we are aware of the framerate problem in the last 3 firmwares and other reported minor bugs and it’ll be fixed in the next version.”

I’m still using the WD Live HD but the trust is gone. I still want a small & comfy media player that handles videos, photos and music from usb devices, let’s see how long i can endure the sloppiness…

gobey wrote:

Say what you want Techflaws.  I’m 44 years old,  and my wdtv live is easily the most unstable, and dissapointing electronic product I’ve ever owned.  WD needs a new slogan “Buy it  now, we’ll fix it later”.

If age makes a difference, I’m 60 about to be 61 this weekend. Never thought I would make it to 45!

Really, if you want a frustrating piece of hardware go find yourself a Seagate FreeAgent Theater Plus or a Seagate GoFlex TV!!  They both use the same software and they are BOTH big turds. Oh they’ll play just about any file you toss their way, but it’s real problems show when you try to use it with a media software like PlayOn or PMS. It’s programming code was open until Netflix, I guess, insisted it be locked down. Now no one will ever fix it, not even Seagate. WD’s stuff by comparison is a dream come true! Yup it too needs fixin’ but it’s still way better than what I had!

… there’s always something even worse but makes it the worse even better? ; )

and there are more expensive media players available too, the WD Live HD is a quite affordable, does that mean we got what we paid for? WD could accept the help from the customers, corrected translations were sent in but not implemented, maybe even programmers offered help… almost everyone here in the forum would like to exchange the newly added games for some more bugfixes or testing before release, that’s all.

we can’t do anything but posting our thoughts, wishes, feelings about the product and the bugs we encounter.

( ) poor guys at WD, everyone is complaining and ranting, can’t they just be happy with what WD gave them for their money?

( ) now i got this product, i figured out that the software development is still in progress. let’s just hope and wait another year.

make your x or add a line.

One more option:

( ) Sigma SDK is the buggy component of the WDTV firmware. Blame Sigma, not WD.

gobey wrote:

Say what you want Techflaws.  I’m 44 years old,  and my wdtv live is easily the most unstable, and dissapointing electronic product I’ve ever owned.  WD needs a new slogan “Buy it  now, we’ll fix it later”.

Fine by me and certainly also by WD. What’s not ok, however, is to whine in the German subforums about bugs (some of which noone else has been able to reproduce) and complain about “arrogant” mods who simply explained that any decisions regarding fixes in upcoming firmwares is completely out of their hands. When informed about this actually quite simple fact, WDTV-User blamed them and other users some more and swore to drop WD, only to start again in unrelated threads like this one.

Well Techflaws, perhaps frustration is difficult to manage, for some people. 

@Techflaws:

to whine in the German subforums about bugs (some of which noone else has been able to reproduce)”, please excuse, is a funny comment and kinda reflects why we - ok, some users - feel ignored by WD.

How did it come that many users (who actually know what “auto framerate” means and does!) encounter the same problem with the last few firmware releases?

I would say maybe 98% auf the US customers leave it the way it comes (which is 60Hz) or set their WD Live to 1080p 60Hz. 24p material plays still fine with 60Hz (or they just don’t bother) and they simply don’t own any 50Hz videos, so a problem with switching the framerate between 50/60/24Hz is not really visible to them.

Maybe they are not able to reproduce this @WD because they don’t have any european WD Live HD at hands anymore? ; ) But if they didn’t made any other changes to the hardware than to the power supply part they should be able to reproduce this problem on their test equipment. And as i said, the hardware is all the same so why should anyone be unable to reproduce a specific bug? We’re all in one big boat.

I can confirm the auto framerate not working on four! WD Live HD Players with 6 different LCD TVs and one projector attached via HDMI. I already posted the version/firmware of the WD Player and my Sony TV, so the responsible guys @WD could definitely reproduce this problem (if they want to).


Dear dss_cottage

 

A smart Decision. :smileyvery-happy: Western Digital promises much and holds few.  I use now a  A.C. Ryan PlayOn! HD2 . It works good. Moderators and Developers are very nice and not  arrogant. :wink:

Talk about an annoying website.  It relies heavily on eye catching graphics and has very little actual information.  That product appears to be in a completely different price range from most of these media streamers.  If you’re going to spend that much you might as well get a full (nettop) computer.

vhs-gucker wrote:

@Techflaws:

to whine in the German subforums about bugs (some of which noone else has been able to reproduce)”, please excuse, is a funny comment and kinda reflects why we - ok, some users - feel ignored by WD.

Actually it’s not funny at all, cause this is not the bug WDTV-User and I were referring to. The autoframe bug is confirmed and annoying.

Thank you for this information, Techflaws, that’s ok then. It just makes sad, that it takes so (too) long to fix it. :frowning:

Yes, WDTV-User has a different problem, but the overall situation here results from the general bugs we get with every firmware release. Maybe Sigma changed things to their devkit whatever, but WD should get a lot of things done within 3 month a customer would expect (from a big company) and if something works it should work in the next firmware as well.

We only can see the problems from signed in customers here, customers who were able and willing to come here. That doesn’t mean the rest out there is satisfied. We just see the accumulated “high voltage output” of a few. Sure we should stay calm, nice and friendly but there’s always a peak.

p.s. the included games won’t raise the happiness. ; )