My first post - three hours after buying my WD TV Live.
My movies are stored on my laptop which is connected by cable to my WiFi router. I originally bought the WD TV Live to work wirelessly but the delay in file processing was terrible. I’ve now wired the WD TV Live directly to the router but even so there is at least one minute of “yellow-arrow time, Y.A.T.” between pressing OK and the film starting. The film is about 0.2Gb and is an .flv file. I’ve also tried with a similar sized .mp4 and get the same delay. Also, after about 15 minutes the movie “jumps” and the sounds switches off (almost like it is being fast-forwarded). Restarting and resuming the movie resulted in three minutes of Y.A.T. before I gave up. A couple of other files lasted longer than 15 minutes but all had long startups. The router is a Sitecom X6 900 job, only a couple of days old so I don’t see a problem there.
Anybody got any ideas why startup is so long, and why the file jumps after a while?
I would recommend ensuring your device is updated to the latest firmware release, and confirming if you experience the same issues with direct playback of the same files via USB. If you do, then the files may need to be re-encoded for compatibility.
You should download the mediainfo software and post output from a couple of the problem files. Having problems resuming playing a file is a fairly common symptom of a “bad” file (improperly encoded for SMP, etc.). The jumping you note can represent a problem getting streamed data fast enough or without interruption from the server. Is your laptop definitely not doing anything else while you are streaming? You sure it doesn’t have malware, etc. issues? Taking a minute to buffer up to start playing a video is not right.
It also is possible to have router settings that can interfere with proper network performance. Age of the router is not really a guarantee that it is setup/functioning properly.
Do you have a second computer in the house that you could use to help diagnose with?
The files all play on my other, wired, devices. I updated the firmware straight out of the box and got these problems. I have since rolled back to the earlier version but still have solw to start and jumpy playback after five minutes or so.
I have the latest firmware on my router. I read another post bemoaning the quality of 2.4GHz as a streaming frequency, but as this is (apparently) the only frequency that the WD will receive then there’s nothing really can be said about that. My intention was to have several WDs about the house, attached to diferent TVs but this obviously isn’t going to work.
I have since wired my WD directly to the router and the files play all the way through, although it still takes a good 40 seconds before playback starts. Looks like wireless and streaming just don’t go together.
So, plugging a USB hard drive directly into the WD results in instant, flawless playback.
But once I wire everything through my router I get the slow startup and often broken playback.
Based on this does it sound like there’s something wrong with my brand new router? Is there a setting I should check to try to improve connectivity? Any assistance with this would be much 'preciated.
