Ok. I did all the research before buying it, and all I wanted is a unit that will playback different formats I can watch on my TV, to avoid converting them to DVD (time consuming). My main concern is the output quality ■■■■■…and we are not talking about price here, as the same MPEG files play with razor sharp quality out of a unit costing HALF the price, only it doesn’t support the extra formats.
The chipset quality used is ■■■■ obviously, and particularly for MPEG decoding. The image has an overall noisy / grainy feel and is not too sharp. I can clearly see visible noise on any output…even on very high bit rate video, the same video played from another standalone unit are noise free and clean, so this comes down to 2 things…poor chipset used in this product, poor software used internally. I have an ADS Instant DVD which is a small box, encodes and decodes, has outputs too, and I’ve played the SAME mpeg-2 files, and my God what bloody differences do I see, pristine, clean, razor sharp playback, on the SAME TV !
The memory capacity for the firmware for the WD Live is not fully used, there is a LOT of room left for enhancements…this is what bothers me, why the hell didn’t they add a GOTO support, which is very basic and easy to add !!! When you watch a video fast forwarding is very annoying, ANY player would let you quickly jump to any segment of your video.
ALSO - why the hell support VOB playback and not support DVD Menu and chatpering support ?!?!?!? There is more than enough memory on the unit to add these SMALL features.
There is SO MUCH features the chipset used can support but only a fraction of it are exploited.!
But putting aside all the quirks, the biggest disappointment is image quality ! I’ve seen better decoding quality from FREEWARE based codecs !
This is why I said this product has a lot of potential but is unfinished and poorly tested. The unit’s output is horrible, IRE levels are wrong (speaking of which there should be an option for IRE 0 / 7.5 setups).
WD reminds me of ADS, poor support, and they stopped releasing new driers and updates too quickly.
Then you have another person releasing homebrew firmwares and WD ALLOWING this, knowing that this kind of thing voids your warranty and can harm your unit and his firmware ■■■■■ anyways as it is more of a cosmetic change and not feature based.
What is actually POOR is WD’s firmweare - I’m sure the internal chipset used when programmed properly can deliver much better picture output.
