Only a portion of the video is played

I purchased the WD TV Live media player because it is supposed to be capable of playing MPEG2 files. I was pleased to see that it does. This even includes those in a transport stream container (i.e., .tp or .ts file extensions). However, it appears that it only plays a small portion, maybe 20 to 30 minutes, of such files. The file information displayed shows a file size that is substantially smaller than the actual files. When finished playing a portion of the file we end up with a blank (black) screen. There is no more video or audio. The device will allow return to either file menus or the home page. However, once this happens, on any file that was played, the device will not play any more video files. This condition persists even through a power off/on. On at least one occasion it was able to repeat the cycle (i.e., play a portion of a file and then crape out as described) after allowing the device to be idle in standby mode for about a day. The initial experience was with the out of the box device. Between occurrences I did allow the unit to upgrade to the most current version of the firmware. Bottom line is that the playback was very nice for a short while but without resolution of this problem the device is completely useless to me.

The files in question range from around 5 or 6 GB to 10 or 12 GB, which is from 1 to 2 hours of playback time. In that, full length movies & concerts. In my situation, the WD TV Live is attached via a wired connection to a local area network that has several windows computers (WXP & W7) as well as Network Attached Storage (NAS). Up until now all of the successful playback has been of files residing on the NAS. It appears to me as though I’ve been able to access files on the NAS using both Windows Shares as well as a uPnP Server that is running on the NAS. The various lists seem to show the correct folder contents which suggests that that there is at least some proper network communications that is occurring. It looks very much like the codec hangs in a way that it cannot resume play.

First try to play one of those files from local USB with your network cable detached. If it still doesn’t play, remux with ProjectX or MKVToolnix.

I still haven’t spent a lot of time playing with this new device but the problem I reported seems to have been resolved.  Leaving the device off overnight seemd to correct the persistence problem.  In that, I could again navigate to a video and play it.  I took 2 different actions between the reported failures and what looks to be resolution.  First, my Windows workgroup is NOT named WORKGROUP.  Therefore, I figured out how to configure the WD TV Live device to use my workgroup.  Second, I updated the firmware on the NAS device (D-Link DNS-321) where I have stored a large amount of media to include many of the subject mpeg2 (HDTV) files (recordings).  While I think I tried both methods the NAS includes a UPnP server which I’m finding preferrable to using windows shares.

This makes the situation much better and reduces my complaint to the fact that the WD TV Live hung up so completely without providing any indication of what was wrong.  I’m still left with mere speculation about the cause of a serious malfunction.