I absolutely have no axe to grind - and I’m not returning the product and thank you for your concern that I “messed” the product - I’m certainly not a newbie there,[text deleted]
I never said my unit failed - it hasn’t, but they could have used a better design in terms of heat dissipation - the unit does use a passive heatsink, but like most set top digital boxes that also become hot, you should leave it in an open well vented area. While the chip is a low powered processor, ithe unit gets hot after prolonged use because the heatsink is dissipating heat properly but it is mostly TRAPPED inside the unit, with no movement of air. Simply relying on vents is NOT enough, you need to move air, much like the air flow you have in your PC case. YES the unit CAN fail with time if it overheats.
At first I thought the unit used a crappy chipset so I decided to investigate further. Yes the design is flimsey, it’s true that the caps and other components are found in computer components as well - don’t ever compare the caps used in TVs - conventional TVs used high charge capacitors that are way bigger and a whole different ball game. Yes some computer components were plagued with the use of cheap/fake caps. The caps used in the WD Live are not the best quality, the unit is obviously not meant to last as long as a motherboard - mind you I’ve seen average to poor components even in higher-end gear.
The unit uses an updated Sigma Secure Media Processor series 8650 - revision 8655 in the WDLive, which has a faster processor, support for more RAM, HDMI 1.3 support…
The chipset used is capable far more than WD gives us in the firmware ! This is what is unacceptable. Why the hell would WD would license a powerful chip and only use a fraction of its true power ???
Ok theboard design also supports 2 1.5Gb/s SATA (eSATA) mind you they didn’t use that and the supported S-Video output probably due to cost constraints - although it would have been nice to have a S-Video connector and an eSATA connector rather than 2 USB ports !
Unit supports pulldown, frame conversion, deinterlacing and other post op functions - 12bit xdYCC processing! Funny because the image output sure doesn’t look that - it looks inferior to a consumer 8bit processing for some codecs. Chip supports custom/programmable up/down scaling and 2D acceleration support. Great - yet WD messes the picture badly by over cropping it - not even offering you size and position options to manually adjust the picture to FULLy fit your TV, especially considering that the image is extended way past the overscan area of a conventional TV! The chip supports these functions, give them to us ! The default values are not optimal for all situations. Unit also supports noise reduction, deblocking, deringing and other post ops - but none of it is provided by WD to adjust - only internal registers that, again, are not optimal for ALL videos being watched !!! The chip also supports chroma, hue, contrast, brightness, gamma, etc… An added picture controls in the settings / video menu where you can adjust these settings and H/V position/scaling size would be a welcomed feature !! Is deinterlacing enabled by default ? This could be what is causing interlaced video output to look like ■■■■ - because viewing QuickTime MOV a nd WMV HD content looks great through my composite and component outputs ! but viewing of other formats, softer/fuzzier. Also the component outputs are a disappoint, and don’t look much better than the regular composite outs, yet the component out of my half priced toshiba player look amazingly better - funny isn’t it ?
I don’t have an axe to grind when I am reporting FACTS - the WD Live is NOT delivering on the full capacity of its hardware !
As far as the DVD + BluRay full MENU support, I would LOVE to see this feature and it is requested by many people too - it’s probably not included due to licensing issues. The chipset used does NOT have native support for full DVD Specs, unlike DVD Players, so this would probably require a lot of time to reconstruct this & the licensing fees with it, although it would be good to support the DVD spec partially, and only menus and chapters.
About the flimsey connectors - yes it’s true you can use USB extension cables, that’s what I use now, and it works well. A USB2 certified extension cable permanently plugged in the unit, it’s rock solid as I’ve used it on my PC and plugged and unplugged so many times and no problem.
Same for the 1/4 to 3 cables, keep them permanently plugged, those are the most deliate connectors as frequent plugs and unplugs push further apart the contacts that grip the cable’s connection (something that CAN be fixed yourself if you know about these things.
All in all, given the type of revised faster and more powerful processor used, I was surprised to see that the firmwares WD keeps spitting at us does not add any new features other than small fixes - nothing to take full advantage of the power the chips support…which is pathetic to me !
Another thing that I noticed - the unit has provisions for flash recovery - somehow there seems to be a protected boot block area that kicks in if the checksum does not match - assuming of course the BB area was not messed up during a bad flash update as well - in some cases you should be able to recover your flash, BUT it seems even WD messed up things further and cannot provide PROPER support for a function that exists already ! When flashing, instead of fully erasing the EEPROM, why doesn’t it use the same method used now by new motherboards, I notice it being used on m ASUS motherboard, that previously over the years erased the chip ! Instead it erases only a few blocks at a time then writes, etc… if a flash fails, it will fail checksum and go to recovery. The BB area being updated LAST once the flash area has been checked (crc) first ! This would have saved WD a lot of money in replacing people’s bricked devices because they have clueless people who did not do one simple task in checking the new update engine! pathetic again!
[text deleted] I was just curious to see what it did as many people talked about it, and the guy himself claimed it adds many features…It doesn’t - it’s garbage and for the majority of people you will never used the extra function, there IS no extra feature added, the menus are the same, the options are the same, no new ones, no new format support, no added functions, nothing…
Also the box supports WMV9 - why the HELL doesn’t it support WMA Pro formats used in WMV9 videos ??? what use is it to have an HD player if it can’t support some HD audio content !
[text deleted] Those who are aware, will see that I don’t have an axe to grind.
Oh and one more thing - what bloody kind of media player does not come with GOTO support - this is something WD overlooked !!! They should have had a serach by time functino since the FIRST firmware, [text deleted] !