WD TV Live Streaming Feature Questions

Hi all,

I currently own the Live Plus and wanted to ask a few questions about the Streaming version.

  1. It sounds like it can, but does it allow you to build a “now playing” or custom playlist on the fly for music?  The Live Plus only allowed adding a single selection, not browse in and out of folders/categories to enqueue more than one album from different artists and add them to the “now playing” list.  If it does, what do or don’t you like about how it works?
  2. Like question 1 above, can you add multiple items for video playback?
  3. I know it tracks recently watched content, but does it make it easy for you to watch the next unwatched episode of a series?  It looks like the Filter option might help with this but again, do you like how it works (is it user friendly or fiddly)?
  4. Does it perform auto-framerate detection of input files?  The Live Plus did this in an earlier firmware but was broken in the current version.

I appreciate any insight into the above questions to determine if it’s worth upgrading to the new box.

EDIT: Also if any of you could create a YouTube video of some of these features in action and provide a link, that would be fantastic!  There’s diddly-squat on YouTube about this device’s advanced features in use (that’s in English anyway).

Cheers.

  1.  No, not really.   You can create a “Queue,” but that’s not really a playlist.  

  2.  Yes., to the QUEUE.

  3.  No.

  4.  Yes, but it doesn’t work correctly for all TVs.

Cheers, Tony.  That’s a bit disappointing to hear.

Well I went out and bought an SMP a few days ago and thought I’d post some more detailed answers to my own questions for anyone else who might be interested.  Thanks again to Tony for his initial input.

  1. It’s not the best implementation but like Tony says you can get the desired result by using the Queue.  My process is as follows:
  •  I browse my audio by folders and enter the folder of the album I want to add to the “now playing” queue.
  • Choosing the options menu I can “select many” and choose all files on the current page.
  • If required, I move to the next page and bulk select the rest of the files as well (it’s still in “select many” mode).
  • I then choose “add to queue” from the options menu and both selected pages will be added.
  • I then go back a few times and browse to the next album folder I want to enqueue and perform the above steps again.
  • Once my selections are made, I go to the Dashboard → Queue → Audio and press “Play” once I select the first item.
  • I then go “Home” and choose the “Now Playing” item from the main tile selections.
  • If I want to shuffle the list, I then change the playback mode to “Shuffle”.
  • My selected albums are now going to play in a jukebox mode.
  1.  Follow the same steps as in 1) above except for videos.  You can’t make a single queue out of a mix of audio and video - they’re kept separate.

  2. I haven’t found a good way to filter out recently watched items yet, but with the Content Info for TV shows being available I find this requirement a lot less important since you can check the synopsis of recent episodes and determine which one you’re up to yourself without having to start viewing each video like I had to on the old box.

EDIT: It does track which videos have been viewed after all!  When viewing the Content Info for a video file, there’s a “circle” icon next to the favourite icon that changes once viewed.  I’ve only had it fill with a half-circle even though I’ve watched it from start to end, but presumably it should totally fill if it’s fully watched.  Either way, it is tracking when a video file has been watched.

  1. This works well on my configuration but admittedly I haven’t watched a lot of content yet since I’ve only had the device for a few days now.  But I have tried a variety of file formats (MKV, BR ISO, AVI, M2TS) and they have worked fine.

That’s about it.