I purchased a WDTV Gen2 for my grandmother but finding out that you can’t fast forward mp4 files without the audio going out of sync has made this device completely and utterly useless. Reading some of the other posts on this forum this has been an error that has been reported for sometime now (last posted WDTV Gen2 Firmware update was on 12/3/09) and WD has not even given a time frame in which we can expect a new Firmware update to correct this problem. This alone with the fact WD never responds to any posts on their forums shows that WD doesn’t have any interest in providing any help/support to their customers.
I personal stream all my media to my Playstation 3 which has no problems playing most mp4 files and after using WD’s rubbish I’ve decided to just buy my old gran a PS3 as well.
yes I did…In fact in a couple of days my **bleep**y wdtv gen2 will be a gift for parents and I will buy a Meder8er which for the same price is capable of playing any format without issues and titles are adjustable (position and size not limited to 40)…I think WD company reached a bottom…IMHO
the most embarassing thing is that they dont care about their customers…i think they will perish soon…deserved…
Are you saying that you buy products with advertised functionality with no expectation that it’ll do what it’s supposed to? I realize that they never said anywhere on the box that the audio would by in sync with the video…so how dare we expect it? Seriously, this is a huge issue and it’s been around for qutie a while. Not only do I have this problem with .mp4s, but some .avis as well. And sometimes I can rewind and pause and fastforward and rewind etc. and it’ll get back on track but that’s pretty rediculous. I don’t care if I paid $2 for the thing. If it says it can do something, it better do it. And since it doesn’t, my perception of western digital as a producer of quality is dropping pretty fast.
Yes, big time… However, I don’t blame WD but myself for NOT DOING HOMEWORK before buying it. It’s my first player and I didn’t really care to waste $100. Anyway, what do you expect when you buy a cheap product made in China? The same problem with my WD 1.5TB drive I bought at the same time. That’s another rant… No offense to the Chinese people since I’m a Chinese American too. I just got another problem where it suddenly couldn’t play movies anymore. I posted that problem on another link today. So there are three big problems so far (subtitle, HDMI, and can’t play movies anymore). I managed to resolve the HDMI problem with a box cutter tip. Too much time wasted to trouble shoot. Anyway, I’ve done a little more research and already ordered another player from another company and it should be here this Friday. If that box solved all the problems I had as were reviewed by many people, then I guess I can microwave my WD TV
So to WD staff if you listened, I hope you want to keep those unsatisfied customers like me and step up and do something about your products.
Ok, I finally got my new player (Prodigi PD-100N) this weekend and all I can say is UNBELIEVABLE. It solved all my problems that I had with WD TV and gave me more for a $99.47 (including shipping) from Amazon. Here’s my quick test this weekend:
Pros:
- Nice little unit with all the cables (including HDMI)
- Plug and pray (and yes it worked perfectly right out of the box)
- HDMI gives me 1080p resolution. All my movies suddenly are so clear and beautiful. I didn’t not know that since WD TV always gave me lower resolution and all this time I thought my movies are low resolution.
- Subtitle works great and I love the fact the I can change color from the default white to other colors (I picked yellow)
- FF/Reverse up to 32x (WD TV only has 16x). However, the time search is even better, faster
Firmware update is fairly frequent and most importantly I heard that they do listen to customers
2 years warranty
The remote control is much better than WD TV once you got used to (ie change subtitle font size/color on the fly, edit/delete filename)
Cons:
- The USB port is in front makes the cable looks a little bit ugly.
- Menu not as nice as WD TV but I think it can be upgraded with the new firmware in the future.
I gave it a five stars… I’m not sure what do I do with the WD TV now since it’s only 3 months old.
One thing I want to mention is that I’m not affiliated with them in anyway. As I mentioned in the other thread I hate “made in China” product but this is one unit that I have to give credit for. I hope WD will take things seriously before losing more customers like me.
To find out more info about this product, go here:
yes because it can’t play gapless flac. amazing such a simple feature canno’t be added.
and now it looks like they released a few more new models that also don’t support this feature. so the odds of them adding this feature to the original model seem pretty much slim to none.
i’m glad i only spent $70 bucks on a refurb unit.
hopefully one of these open souce communities will develop this feature.
Yes. Where the WDTV HD version 1 played my mp4 movies with aac audio, the “updated” version 2 has the audio 5 - 10 seconds out of sync. Apparently WD would rather we (seems many people are frustrated with this problem) return the products so they can be resold as “out of box”, than issue a firmware update that addresses these and other video/audio issues.
I had the problem with the Gen 2 unit, as well. It comes from the use of AAC audio codec in your MP4 or MKV file. If you use MP3 audio encoding, the audio sync issue isn’t there.
Still, I downgraded back to the Gen 1 because I wasn’t fond of having to re-encode things to get them to work properly. The Gen 1 is on clearance in many stores now for under $60 and it’s well worth that price. The only things you lose going from Gen 2 to Gen 1 are DTS, File Management, and USB port power-down. As of right now, though, the Gen 1 plays all codecs and containers BETTER than the Gen 2, thanks to this audio sync problem.
Your choice right now is to wait for WD to acknowledge and fix the AAC audio encoding problem (which they say isn’t their fault; “It’s the fault of the encoder”) or downgrade your firmware (which may or may not work for you). Or do like I did and return the Gen 2, get a Gen 1 for half the price, and deal with not having DTS, File Management, or USB ports that power down when the unit is on standby.
I sometimes regret the purchase especially when I consider that I have quite a few DVDs that were converted to straight ISO files that my previous TVisto player was able to handle without problem and treat the files as the original DVDs with menus, navigation and all. I’d like to see the WDTV support those ISO files. I had to replace the TVisto because a former friend’s cat chewed the audio and video connectors off the proprietary cable that came with the player. I am unable to purchase replacement cables anywhere, even from the manufacturer of the TVisto. No, the cat and cable is not why the friend is a former friend - things happen, time passes… life goes on.
So the short answer is I wish the WDTV would play ISO files and support the DVD menu structure in those files.
But if the ISO DVD menus are supported, I’m hoping there’s a way to turn that off. I’m only adding this because I don’t want WD to come along and add support for that and kill my setup. I have only the main movie so that I don’t have to go through layers and layers of menus and previews and fbi warning and all the other ■■■■. The only thing I want is to press play and watch the movie.
I do understand though that people like the extras and all of the other stuff and that’s fine. I just don’t think that it needs to be totally one way or another. If it did get added (which I don’t think it will) then it would be nice if my ISOs without menus would still work.
No, I don’t have any regrets. I have two Gen 1 players and they work perfectly for me. I was thinking about buying a Gen 2 but I decided I wanted to keep both players the same. I’m glad I decided to stay with Gen 1 after reading about all the problems with the newer players. I would be afraid to buy one of the newer ones now. I’m not sure if it’s all the player’s fault, I think there is some user error in there too. It does seem WD really needs to get on the ball and fix the problems or they won’t be able to sell any of these players. I use MKV files and the software I recommend using is AnyDVD HD, eac3to (which can convert DTS to AC-3), makeMKV and mkvmerge (part of mkvtoolnix).
The WD player never claimed that it would play menus on iso files, so I don’t think it’s fair to judge the machine based on that.
I’ve owned the player for a fair bit of time now…Aside from the mp4 issue that NEEDS to be fixed, I don’t have much to complain about. It plays HD beautifully, it’s relatively quick…I don’t see much difference between WD version 2 and 1 aside from it turning off the usb connection to the hard drive when shut off.
Do I regret getting it? Nope, not really. For less than 100 bucks, it’s a good addition to the home theatre. Are there other machines that do one thing better than this player does? Probably. Are there machines that do everything that this one does better than this one does it, that is within the same price range? I don’t think so.
On the mp4/aac issue, there is no user error. I’ve tried using mp4s from Apple’s website, downloaded off youtube, and torrents. Seems the player has the same problem with ALL mp4 files with aac audio.
This can’t be a hardware fault, as the version 1 machine played mp4 files smoothly. It’s a problem with the firmware.
I don’t get this. Why are they not able to fix the audio sync problem if they had it working in the gen 1 player!
I guess they need to see so many e-mails until they finally get the message?!?!
It’s not a matter of whether they can or not, it’s more a matter of them just not caring. Apparently people are still happy with the players because the ratings on Newegg and Amazon are around 4 of 5 stars. Not bad. No doubt they have lost a few sales due to these problems but I don’t think it’s been enough to cause them to care enough to fix the issue. There are companies out there that design products because they know they can do a better job at it than their competitors and really make a difference, and then there are companies that do just enough to make money and no more. WD is clearly a part of the latter group. Which is surprising because those companies that make stuff because they know they can do it better than anyone else (Apple) can charge a ton of money for their stuff and people are happy to pay for it, whether it’s really worth it or not.
On the mp4/aac issue, there is no user error. I’ve tried using mp4s from Apple’s website, downloaded off youtube, and torrents. Seems the player has the same problem with ALL mp4 files with aac audio.
This can’t be a hardware fault, as the version 1 machine played mp4 files smoothly. It’s a problem with the firmware.
From what I’ve been said by some user in another forum, it is related to a bug in the microcode in the sigma chip. Seems like WD can do nothing about it, except ask Sigma to correct the issue.
