WD TV Live won't play playlists

I set up playlists in Windows Media Player 11 thinking they would play. I get the message that says “no data found in the file”. Level 2 said it is a “path” problem and that the player itself is working ok. I am not a pc guru. But there has to be some way to make this happen. I  have seen other posts that say their player plays playlist without a problem. I need some help with this because WD can’t help.

jayhawker wrote:

I set up playlists in Windows Media Player 11 thinking they would play. I get the message that says “no data found in the file”. Level 2 said it is a “path” problem and that the player itself is working ok. I am not a pc guru. But there has to be some way to make this happen. I  have seen other posts that say their player plays playlist without a problem. I need some help with this because WD can’t help.

There is a problem in making play-lists because they have to contain a path to the drive and directory that the files are in. In a number of circumstances such as attached hard discs the file position will change. How are you playing the files in the playlist. Don’t forget that as far as the WDTV is concerned the disc attached to it has no drive letter and therefore any playlist with a letter will not play.

You could try making playlists with this free program. You may need to play about with the Playlist Details setting regarding ‘absolute’ or ‘relative’ .

http://www.oddgravity.de/app-opc.php

Playlist Creator.

Tks for your reply. I am not sure what youm mean when you asked " How I am playing the playlist?" I don’t know of any other way other than select it within the unit just like any other album. I down loaded Creator 3.6.2 yesterday. How do you make changes to the way it sets up playlists? Is there some instructions on  how to go in and modify something?

I suppose what I really meant was how are you playing the files, via media server, network shares or directly connected disc.

There is a help file with the program and you can try out the different ways of saving the list by going to settings, playlist details.

You could use foobar.

Create whatever playlist you like then save as playlist.

Choose the folder you want to save it in.

Select type m3u files

Save it.

The playlist will be in a WD HD TV Live friendly format.

jayhawker wrote:

I set up playlists in Windows Media Player 11 thinking they would play. I get the message that says “no data found in the file”. Level 2 said it is a “path” problem and that the player itself is working ok. I am not a pc guru. But there has to be some way to make this happen. I  have seen other posts that say their player plays playlist without a problem. I need some help with this because WD can’t help.

WMP 11 playlists work perfectly well with the HDTV Live, providing you follow a few basic rules:

  1. The native WMP 11 playlist format for MP3s will not work, however, WMP 11 does allow you to save playlists in other formats.  M3U is the one you need for HDTV Live.

  2. M3U playlists are held in relative path format, so you need to ensure that the folder structure on the HDTV Live closely resembles that of your source machine, in particular the relative positioning between the playlist folder and the album folders.  I would recommend having your playlist folder at the same folder level as your artist folders, mine is called $Playlists$ to ensure that it is first in the list of artists.

  3. You can also create playlists for photos using the WPL format.  Again, using the same relative folder trick, the HDTV Live will play them - although only through the media server interface.

I continue to get the “this folder has no content” msg.   As a test, I ripped a music CD directly to the drive attached via USB to the WD TVLive. I then used WMP to create a playlist, accessing the contents of the playlist directly from this USB-attached drive, in order to compile my playlist. Then I saved it, in M3U format, directly to this same USB drive. But as always, the same msg.

I guess I don’t really understand your advice regarding a similar folder structure on the HDTV Live and the source machine. In the case I just outlined, would the ‘source machine’ and HDTV Live be one and the same??

I would dearly love to have this thing figured out…if you could walk me thru your instructions  a little more I’d greatly appreciate it.

@BeeoH:

Forget about playlists working on the “Live”! I spent hours and hours to get it working - without any success.

The problem is that the Live can’t handle playlist structures over more then 1 (in words: ONE) folder level - something the original WD TV(Gen 1) was able to do without any problems.

I read in another forum that WD is not willing to address that issue on the Live - as it is like that “by design”.

I now bought a Mede8er and have dumped my Live. I will never ever go for a WD Media Player again - that’s for sure…

Hi,

I’m a novice to this media player stuff . .  Just got my WDTV Live yesterday.  Fiddling & reading about this Playlist thing for a couple hours, and keep getting the No Media message.  What suddenly (inexplicably) worked was using Playlist Creator in Relative mode, and making the playlist from files stored in the WDTV local drive (actually a 4GB thumb drive so far).  Initially it didn’t work.  As noted in a post, I looked at it with Notepad.  I changed the first track by adding a   …\

The  playlist then worked, except that this one modified track name didn’t show up.  So I took out the  …  and left the \ .  That made all 18 tracks show up & play.  I then eliminated the    and now it all still works.  I then created a 2nd playlist, but without any of the Notepad editing.  It works, too!   I know, illogical, but it worked for me.   Maybe it has something to do with priming the pump.  I dunno.

Don

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Swisskiwi wrote:

@BeeoH:

Forget about playlists working on the “Live”! I spent hours and hours to get it working - without any success.

The problem is that the Live can’t handle playlist structures over more then 1 (in words: ONE) folder level - something the original WD TV(Gen 1) was able to do without any problems.

I read in another forum that WD is not willing to address that issue on the Live - as it is like that “by design”.

I now bought a Mede8er and have dumped my Live. I will never ever go for a WD Media Player again - that’s for sure…

I have created playlists with a folder level of 9. Thats a folder labelled 1 with a folder labelled 2 inside that and then a folder labelled 3 inside that and so on down to 9. I then added my mp3’s to the 9th level and created a playlist - both m3u and pls. These playlists were saved in a folder called ‘playlists’ on my WDTV attached hard drive and were immediately picked up on the the ‘playlist’ menu. All the playlists played on the WDTV both from the media library and via the folders. I then attached the hard drive to my computer and also managed to play the playlists with winamp.

As I said before forget Windows Media Player and get Playlist Creator (its free and designed for the job). Go to ‘settings’ - ‘playlist details’ and change ‘saving playlist entries’ to ‘relative (e.g. “…\MyMusic\MySong.mp3”)’. Type a name for the playlist and save in either m3u or pls format on the hard disc that contains the music files for the playlist. Thats all there is too it.

Download Playlist Creator from the link below. (ensure that you go to the bottom of the screen and download the setup file in the green box - there are other download links on the page for other programs)

http://www.oddgravity.de/app-opc.php

I am not saying that you cannot make playlists from Windows Media Player but as you have all found its not that simple, unlike this program.

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Hi richUK,

After posting my initial comments, I decided to try your earlier suggestion to download Playlist Creator. I saved playlists, in each of the three formats offered (relative, absolute A & B). Then I tried to play each format…the absolute ones gave me the same old msg, but miraculously, the relative format worked first time!!

Needless to say, I’m delighted, and have only you to thank. :slight_smile:

     ‘I read in another forum that WD is not willing to address that issue on the Live - as it is like that “by design”.’

That is outrageous if true.  If a manufacturer’s specs they sell their product on say the thing supports .m3u, as they do, then they’re obligated to support it.  Not half-a**ed sort of have their machine respond to it some of the time.  Crippled “by design”.  Right.

redrick wrote:

     ‘I read in another forum that WD is not willing to address that issue on the Live - as it is like that “by design”.’

 

That is outrageous if true.  If a manufacturer’s specs they sell their product on say the thing supports .m3u, as they do, then they’re obligated to support it.  Not half-a**ed sort of have their machine respond to it some of the time.  Crippled “by design”.  Right.

Myself and the person above you have made playlists. If you or others cannot get them to work then you have obviously made them incorrectly. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet particularity when its a 3rd party quote.

      "Myself and the person above you have made playlists.

      If you or others cannot get them to work then you have obviously made them incorrectly.

      Don’t believe everything you read on the internet particularity when its a 3rd party quote."

I don’t.  And am less likely to from those who claim to have all the answers.

I too have made playlists.  The issue is that it is awkward, and the correct method, if there is one (possibly it, as a few people’s experiences like the one who had to “prime” the system, is simply “wonky”) is not documented and unnecessarily complicated and incompatible.

This is what I did to get all my playlists to show and work.  (Possibly our misunderstanding is that some of you only have a few playlists, try a few, and if they work think all is well.  I have over 250 GB of music files, and at the moment, 358 playlists.  Thank heaven for Notepad++ and it’s ability to change hundreds of files at once.)

All the playlists have to be in the main Music folder.  That is from my computer \Wdtvlive\USB_Drive\Music.

Each line of the playlists needs to start with the next folder down.  With my structure that means a typical line might be:

CDs2/ClassicalPeriod/Album/Artist/01 First piece.mp3

No / or …/ at the beginning of the line, but see below.  And all playlists must be encoded UTF-8.  If they are ANSI some of the selections will be missing from some of them.  Notepad++ can change any playlist back and forth from ANSI to UTF-8.  Also there are free apps on the web to mass convert a large number of text files from ANSI to UTF-8.  But if you have a large number of playlists I strongly suggest you save a folder of them in ANSI as you may want them for something else in future and I didn’t notice any free UTF-8 to ANSI apps out there.

Now, with all playlists edited properly and in the Music folder, just getting the TV Live to recognize the USB drive can be problematical, but that’s been discussed in another thread and is a separate issue.  I wound up doing this:

Turn off Media Library.  Turn off then unplug WD Live.  Plug in USB drive.  Plug WD back in.  Go to music and make sure it sees the drive.  Then turn on the Media Library.  Go to the drive and you’ll get a searching message and the light will start blinking.  When the light stops blinking, I find that about 2/3 of the playlists will work, the rest give a “no media” message.  You can tell which playlists will work in a long list because the working ones will show their size, the non-working ones won’t.

Now the trick is to turn off the Music Library and repeat this whole procedure a few times and eventually it had all my playlists working.

Simple intuitive process, right?  Great out-of-the-box experience.

Oh, and by the way if you want to use these same playlists on a network share drive, you do need to put the / at the start of each line.  Again the playlists need to be in that top Music folder, not in a folder under it called Playlists!  But otherwise the network shares do the playlists with much less hassle and work fine immediately.

I use a network drive, Twonkyvision, and a D-link DSM-320 in our living room.  I bought WD TV Live for my room.  I am able to use the same network drive for both but it’s a bit complicated.  Watch out for that UTF-8 encoding I mentioned before.  Windows, Twonky, and most Multi-tagger programs default to ANSI.  Also Twonky is better without the / at the beginning of lines, although it doesn’t care whether you use \ or /.  So I set up the Twonky with its playlists in a Playlists folder and redo the database overnight, leaving any auto-rescan off.  Then I copy the UTF-8 set of files to the Music directory and Twonky won’t know about them.  Now the living room system works and WD TV can use the attached usb, or the mentioned network drive as either a Media Server or a Network share, plus a few other things on my network, and all work even if all three computers in the house are off.  In fact, I have it wired so that both the NAS-Twonky server will work for the living room and of course the attached USB drive for the WD in my room even if the network is down.

Yes, I know my way around these things and can generally get them to work one way or other.  I hope my particular experiences may be helpful to others.  Unfortunately, I’ve only got this all up for a few days so whether further problems will be encountered or the whole thing will come crashing down I couldn’t say.

And when a manufacturer poorly implements and even more poorly documents an advertised feature and then says this is “by design” they ought to be called on it.  And when people haven’t gotten it to work (yet) it would be fairer to say they haven’t guessed right yet rather that they “obviously made them incorrectly”.  And don’t be too sure you’ve done everything correctly until you’ve made at least a few dozen playlists, made sure they all work, and check that the number of selections in them matches between how many are there on the WD and how many in the actual file.

Rick


redrick wrote:

      "Myself and the person above you have made playlists.

      If you or others cannot get them to work then you have obviously made them incorrectly.

      Don’t believe everything you read on the internet particularity when its a 3rd party quote."

 

I don’t.  And am less likely to from those who claim to have all the answers.

 

I too have made playlists.  The issue is that it is awkward, and the correct method, if there is one (possibly it, as a few people’s experiences like the one who had to “prime” the system, is simply “wonky”) is not documented and unnecessarily complicated and incompatible.

 

This is what I did to get all my playlists to show and work.  (Possibly our misunderstanding is that some of you only have a few playlists, try a few, and if they work think all is well.  I have over 250 GB of music files, and at the moment, 358 playlists.  Thank heaven for Notepad++ and it’s ability to change hundreds of files at once.)

 

All the playlists have to be in the main Music folder.  That is from my computer \Wdtvlive\USB_Drive\Music.

 

Each line of the playlists needs to start with the next folder down.  With my structure that means a typical line might be:

 

CDs2/ClassicalPeriod/Album/Artist/01 First piece.mp3

 

No / or …/ at the beginning of the line, but see below.  And all playlists must be encoded UTF-8.  If they are ANSI some of the selections will be missing from some of them.  Notepad++ can change any playlist back and forth from ANSI to UTF-8.  Also there are free apps on the web to mass convert a large number of text files from ANSI to UTF-8.  But if you have a large number of playlists I strongly suggest you save a folder of them in ANSI as you may want them for something else in future and I didn’t notice any free UTF-8 to ANSI apps out there.

 

Now, with all playlists edited properly and in the Music folder, just getting the TV Live to recognize the USB drive can be problematical, but that’s been discussed in another thread and is a separate issue.  I wound up doing this:

 

Turn off Media Library.  Turn off then unplug WD Live.  Plug in USB drive.  Plug WD back in.  Go to music and make sure it sees the drive.  Then turn on the Media Library.  Go to the drive and you’ll get a searching message and the light will start blinking.  When the light stops blinking, I find that about 2/3 of the playlists will work, the rest give a “no media” message.  You can tell which playlists will work in a long list because the working ones will show their size, the non-working ones won’t.

 

Now the trick is to turn off the Music Library and repeat this whole procedure a few times and eventually it had all my playlists working.

 

Simple intuitive process, right?  Great out-of-the-box experience.

 

Oh, and by the way if you want to use these same playlists on a network share drive, you do need to put the / at the start of each line.  Again the playlists need to be in that top Music folder, not in a folder under it called Playlists!  But otherwise the network shares do the playlists with much less hassle and work fine immediately.

 

I use a network drive, Twonkyvision, and a D-link DSM-320 in our living room.  I bought WD TV Live for my room.  I am able to use the same network drive for both but it’s a bit complicated.  Watch out for that UTF-8 encoding I mentioned before.  Windows, Twonky, and most Multi-tagger programs default to ANSI.  Also Twonky is better without the / at the beginning of lines, although it doesn’t care whether you use \ or /.  So I set up the Twonky with its playlists in a Playlists folder and redo the database overnight, leaving any auto-rescan off.  Then I copy the UTF-8 set of files to the Music directory and Twonky won’t know about them.  Now the living room system works and WD TV can use the attached usb, or the mentioned network drive as either a Media Server or a Network share, plus a few other things on my network, and all work even if all three computers in the house are off.  In fact, I have it wired so that both the NAS-Twonky server will work for the living room and of course the attached USB drive for the WD in my room even if the network is down.

 

Yes, I know my way around these things and can generally get them to work one way or other.  I hope my particular experiences may be helpful to others.  Unfortunately, I’ve only got this all up for a few days so whether further problems will be encountered or the whole thing will come crashing down I couldn’t say.

 

And when a manufacturer poorly implements and even more poorly documents an advertised feature and then says this is “by design” they ought to be called on it.  And when people haven’t gotten it to work (yet) it would be fairer to say they haven’t guessed right yet rather that they “obviously made them incorrectly”.  And don’t be too sure you’ve done everything correctly until you’ve made at least a few dozen playlists, made sure they all work, and check that the number of selections in them matches between how many are there on the WD and how many in the actual file.

 

Rick

 

    • *> My playlists are in a folder labelled ‘playlists’ which is on the same drive as the music files and made with the program ‘Playlist Creator’. Personally I would rather have some files missing  then go through what you do. My playlists take about a minute to make and I play them via network shares. I go for the easy option, no media libray playing and no server. What has WDTV got to do with missing files in the playlist, surely thats down to the way the playlist is made. I am really not surprised that your playlists don’t always work as the whole process seems mighty complicated.  I really don’t understand why your files have to be in certain folders etc, as long as the basic list points to the correct file then the WDTV should play it. The list is a simple pathway to the file. It may be that your collection is overwhelming the WDTV but surely all your 358 lists are not reading the complete 250GB so the actual total size of your music collection is mostly irrelevant.> Using a program to make playlists is what computing is all about, its quick and easy and best of all its free.> Regarding the ‘poorly implements and even more poorly documents an advertised feature’ bit can you point me to where WD says this is ‘by design’.

What you’re basically saying is that your needs are simple and even then you don’t mind if  a few of your selections don’t play.  I’m sure WD wishes all its customers were as undemanding.

Playlist Creator is a fine little app.  (Though dozens of others work just as well.  Somebody seems to be “pushing” it here.)  My playlists are also made by machine but when they need to be in a slightly different form for different uses I find it much easier to bulk edit them than to remake all of them “by machine”.

Someone else’s post earlier in this thread quoted WD as saying “by design”.  You will note that my first post here said, “If that’s true…”

I fail to see why it bothers you that other people might have wider musical interests or more complicated audio equipment configurations than you do.  WD’s claims tell me they should be able to meet my needs.  And they can be made to do so with rather more complications and trial and error than I think is reasonable.  If you are quite happy with the product I’m glad for you.  To what purpose do you troll through topics of people having problems making the unhelpful comment that we’re asking too much?

Rick

redrick wrote:

What you’re basically saying is that your needs are simple and even then you don’t mind if  a few of your selections don’t play.  I’m sure WD wishes all its customers were as undemanding.

 

Playlist Creator is a fine little app.  (Though dozens of others work just as well.  Somebody seems to be “pushing” it here.)  My playlists are also made by machine but when they need to be in a slightly different form for different uses I find it much easier to bulk edit them than to remake all of them “by machine”.

 

Someone else’s post earlier in this thread quoted WD as saying “by design”.  You will note that my first post here said, “If that’s true…”

 

I fail to see why it bothers you that other people might have wider musical interests or more complicated audio equipment configurations than you do.  WD’s claims tell me they should be able to meet my needs.  And they can be made to do so with rather more complications and trial and error than I think is reasonable.  If you are quite happy with the product I’m glad for you.  To what purpose do you troll through topics of people having problems making the unhelpful comment that we’re asking too much?

 

Rick

My purpose in what you call trolling is to help other users. I quoted the program because it worked and hoped it would help other people get their playlists working, no doubt there are a number of other programs which also work. I simply wanted to show that its not that difficult making playlists and they in fact do work - note the title of this thread. I believe lots of other people with ‘simple’ needs will now be able to make playlists and be happy. Your advice will no doubt help the others who are in your words more demanding.

If you read my other messages helping users you will see that I have recommended many other programs and my recommendation for this program was due only to finding it by a quick Google. You are perfectly at liberty to recommend other programs if you wish to help out the community.

I have created playlists with a folder level of 9. Thats a folder labelled 1 with a folder labelled 2 inside that and then a folder labelled 3 inside that and so on down to 9. I then added my mp3’s to the 9th level and created a playlist - both m3u and pls. These playlists were saved in a folder called ‘playlists’ on my WDTV attached hard drive and were immediately picked up on the the ‘playlist’ menu. All the playlists played on the WDTV both from the media library and via the folders. I then attached the hard drive to my computer and also managed to play the playlists with winamp.

As I said before forget Windows Media Player and get Playlist Creator (its free and designed for the job). Go to ‘settings’ - ‘playlist details’ and change ‘saving playlist entries’ to ‘relative (e.g. “…\MyMusic\MySong.mp3”)’. Type a name for the playlist and save in either m3u or pls format on the hard disc that contains the music files for the playlist. Thats all there is too it.

Download Playlist Creator from the link below. (ensure that you go to the bottom of the screen and download the setup file in the green box - there are other download links on the page for other programs)

http://www.oddgravity.de/app-opc.php

I am not saying that you cannot make playlists from Windows Media Player but as you have all found its not that simple, unlike this program.

This worked perfect  Thanks for the info

I was able to set up Playlists easily.  Note:  I had already saved my music in simple folders labeled with the bands’ names–I didn’t try this with sub-folders, so I don’t know if that would make a difference.

I added the music on the Iomega HD I use with the WD to my Windows Media Player 11 library, then created playlists using those files.  Then I copied the playlist files to the HD.  WD Live found them, and played them without difficulty.

I was having problems playing playlist until i finally figured it out…

I wanted to make a playlist of the music on my pc which was conected through the network to the WD TV Live. I wanted to be able to play it upstairs on my WDTV Live connected to my TV.

I found out you can edit m3u files using any text editor.  What i noticed when i opened the file is it was using the complete path to the mp3’s. ie. C://My Documents/My Music/Artist/Song.mp3. Which is maybe good for the PC, but not the WDTV Live. I had placed the m3u under My Music on the PC. All i had to do was erase “C://My Documents/My Music” and leave the path from where the m3u file was (My Music) to the mp3.

So i was instead of

C://My Documents/My Music/Artist/Song.mp3

I edited the m3u to say

Artist/Song.mp3

It is now working. I’ve been doing this all manually. Maybe i can find a program that will automatically do this for me.

Hope this makes sense, and is able to help some people…