Hi Everyone. Just bought a house and racking my brains on streaming my media. I am about to buy a WDTV Live, just had a couple questions:
I have many folders of dvd rips (VIDEO_TS, vob files, etc) Will the WDTV Live play these files? Will it do it gappless, so there is no pause after each vob file?
What about straight Blu Ray rips?
For those using a pc as a server, do most of you just share your folders? Do you employ a server program on the pc to use with the WDTV (Plex, Serviio )?
How does the album art look when playing music files off the network?
thanks guys. With the WDTV Live, Do you find that using a media server program (plex, serviio, etc) benefits people in any way over just sharing files on a pc?
I was hoping for a nicer interface on the tv for playing music during parties. People can take a look at the tv to see what’s playing. They say the apple tv has the nicest looking display but I don’t feel like converting all my videos. I know the WD players are rock solid. I’m in the market for a new HT receiver in the living room and was even thinking about having airplay built in. Too many options and I guess you can’t have it all.
How about the ipad app for WDTV Live? Is it something I can use to totally replace the included remote? THinking of being on my deck with the ipad and controling the music, adding to playlists, changing tracks, vol, etc…
You don’t need a server with the WDTV, although “server-apps” work well with it, like Twonky Beam (a “must have app” for mobile users of tablets, phones), PlayOn. etc.
Don’t expect too much from the iPad app. It is simply the remote on an iPad. You still have to be in line of sight of your TV if you want to add music to the queue. You cannot create playlists on the fly. Use Windows media player to create your playlists.
Personally I don’t use the WD for music - I prefer to use Sonos which is far better suited to that purpose.
I always felt that WD put virtually no thought into the music side of the SMP. Seems like an afterthought to me.
You can use apps like WDTVMedia Zappo TV to ‘Play to’ the SMP but I find it a bit hit & miss.
ugh! I know! Sonos is the end goal for me. I wanted to explore all of what I had at hand and see how it all works before spending the $ on Sonos.
I want to be able to control my music with the ipad (Like Sonos), and have it display what’s playing with nice-looking cover art on the tv (like the appletv), and want to play my ripped dvd & BR discs (straight rips), all in one box! I don’t need to control my dvd/BR rips from the iPad, I can just use the remote for this.
A bit of history: In my apartment I had my pc sitting right next to my tv. A big Antec 1200v with 5 TB of storage. HDMI from the video card straight to my receiver. I use Mymovies to organize all my movies, windows media center 7 to play my dvds, and PowerDVD to play the blu ray rips. This worked great until I moved into my house. Now I have 4 rooms I want to stream to, plus a garage and a deck.
It seems that several boxes are the only way to get everything I want. I have an old xbox360, a new Sony BDP-3100, and am thinking of getting a receiver for the living room with airplay functionality. It’s a mish mosh of things. Learning as much as I can.
I’ve personally had the opposite experience with WD. I got my device almost 2 years now and I had a problem after the last update was released and I called customer service to get assistance and they helped me to get it sorted out. I have a WDTV SMP by the way. Sorry that you had such a bad experience but just wanted to share my experience as well. As to whether or not to buy the device, its definitely not perfect as can be seen by browsing this forum but with most devices it does somethings very well and others very poorly. With everything I think you should buy the streaming device that will do what is most important to you very well.
Here is a tip for anyone calling WD support. If you call them you get Level 1 support in Timbuktu, and they are basically there to tell people to try simple stuff like reboot the player!
If you really want support, ask to be transferred to Level 2 immediately. Tell the Level 1 person you have already tried with Level 1 and you WANT LEVEL 2 support!
I learned this from personal experience; not from any “inside source” at WD.
Good luck with support – I had a great experience – with Level 2.
So, it seems the WDTV is the only player that will play the dvd rip files the way I want. The BR rips (only playing the longest ts file) might be a bit of a deal breaker though. It seems I might have to do the one thing I really did not want to do, transcode all of my movies. Here I go again.
What’s popular these days? I really want to maintain as much of the quality as possible. I am not interested in the “Can’t tell the difference” stuff. I hear about mkv a lot. Apparently this does nothing to alter the media. It just sort of places the data into containers. It seems like a pretty widespread, acceptable and easy way to go. I would love to hear what you guys do/use.
Are you saying no need to create an MKV from a BD disc, but to just extract the M2TS file and use it to play on the WDTV?
If so, how about passing on some more detail and “how to” instructions?
Isn’t this essentially what making an MKV file is doing; i.e. taking the M2TS file of main movie and putting it into an MKV container? My ByteCopy program can make an MKV in around 12 minutes from a BD ISO created by AnyDVDHD, so there is certainly no transcoding taking place in this brief time.
Are you saying no need to create an MKV from a BD disc, but to just extract the M2TS file and use it to play on the WDTV?
There’s no “need” to do that. Programs like DVD Fab, for example, rip BDs to their native M2TS format, but charge extra if you want to put it into MKV.
Putting it into MKV is also “another step” depending on workflow.
M2TS plays fine (including all the subtitle tracks and audio tracks) on the SMP.
I also wanted to avoid the whole “Turning an M2TS into MKV is NOT the same as transcoding” discussion. :smileyvery-happy:
The ONE thing I quickly think of that is lost in M2TS format is chapter support (since M2TS doesn’t have a clue what chapters are.) That’s why I personally rip to MKV.
Tony, I thought the wdtv live player will only play the largetst .m2ts file. Sometimes there are multiple files. I have been using the free version of dvdfab for years! Love it.
TonyPh12345 wrote: > The ONE thing I quickly think of that is lost in M2TS format is chapter support (since M2TS doesn’t have a clue what chapters are.) That’s why I personally rip to MKV.
And why I and most others would want to do the same.
Tony, I thought the wdtv live player will only play the largetst .m2ts file. Sometimes there are multiple files. I have been using the free version of dvdfab for years! Love it.
That’s correct in the context of a BD Folder or ISO.
In this case, I just use TSMuxerGUI to get the whole set and concatenate them together via the BD’s playlist.
Yeah, that’s where it gets tricky. I really do not want to go to mkv or use another program to string the .m2ts files together. I really want to just rip dvd/BR and just leave their native files as is and stream that to a player.
After some more research I found out there is actually a name for this. It’s called BD Lite & BD menu support. My apologies if someone already mentioned it in this thread already. Apparently, these players (wdtv live, BB) are BD lite. They can only play the largest or first .m2ts stream. (Which we already know).
On amazon I saw the kdlinks hd700. Never heard of them before but it seems to get rave reviews on amazon, typically for having BD menu support with native BDMV/ISO folders/files. Hmmmm…The only other player that I know of that supports BDmenu is the Dune, which I have no knowledge of but am aware that it is a top-tier device. More than I want to spend.
BD Lite is a very ambiguous term. It generally means anything between (but not including) the two extremes of 1) NO BD navigation support at all and 2) FULL BD Support as if you were using a full-fledged BD player.
The WDTVs do NOT have ANY BD navigation support, so they can’t even be termed “BD Lite.”
One thing that you *MUST* concern yourself with on any player that claims to have Full-fledged BD support is, in one word: Cinavia.
Cinavia is the BD Copy Protection method that has been imbedded in many Bluray releases (and becoming more common) that *ALL* Bluray licensed players MUST support.
As of 2009, If any player manufactured that supports full BD does NOT support Cinavia, then they are breaking license and patent law, which means they are subject to prosecution (which could, in theory, include impounding every device they’ve ever sold.)
I was hoping to find a “term” to allow for more effiecient searching of media players. Oh well.
For discs that have cinavia I either just leave as a disc and play it on my BR drive on my htpc with powerdvd or just leave it on my htpc ripped and play it with powerdvd. Been working so far. I haven’t seen many discs with this protection, a handful really. And it’s just a matter of time before they find a way to circumvent.
