This is my 3rd or 4th WD Media Player (can’t remember) and it seems this latest model is the least stable one. My unit suffers from many problems lately but I’m not sure it’s firmware related. It sometimes won’t turn on (unless unplugged first), also the sound sometimes cuts out almost completely with 95% distortion (until re-booted). I really hate the long reboot time on these things. My Windows 8 computer boots so much faster than this.
Anyhoo, I would buy another WD streamer basically because I only use it for local network media streaming and nothing else. There doesn’t seem to be another device on the market than can do as much as this unit for this price. I wish Plex or Kodi made a hardware device. I would definitely buy it
I’ll admit the WDTV SMP box and firmware has issues, but I can watch BluRay movies with the same HD audio just fine and from what I can see so far, is that this box is still the best value for what you get to do with it.
So, I understand the frustrations, but at this point I think we all need to wait for something better by WD or any competitors. And so far, no competitors are competing with this small box that plays so many formats.
I’ll put up with its issues until something better comes along. The big problem is nothing seems to be coming along to compete against what this does so well (playing movies). Sure, I can use a small computer and get KODI, but it will cost more than this box.
The big players are selling their boxes at a loss to get u to pay money for their own platforms content (Apple, Google etc). WD in trying to be a free standing player indepenent of content supply, are getting squeezed by better hardware specs for the App happy crowd downloading rather than this boxe’s main target of playing stuff off/thru local disk/network. They might try and steal a match on 4K/H265 support, but the chips to do this are gonna be be eyewateringly expensive at this point in the lifecycle. But at the moment where is this 4K content gonna come from that people can get to their hardisks with no DRM rather than stream? There is no agreed/launched physical media, it’s all streamed with DRM. I doubt WD can find a niche market of playing local 4K content when the other big players will launch streaming 4K support. So a player for H265 on 2K video?..why bother, we are all quite happy using H264… see this box in a very mature market! Maybe this is why WD sacked all the sw engineers on their Media Players at Xmas! :smileyvery-happy: Well, we’ve had no new firmware for any boxes since Xmas so as good a theory as any. Who knows where they go…least of all WD I would bet.
This site is more interested in getting kudus (ridiculous) giving out silly stars etc than trying to ANSWER questions asked here. Readers need help that’s why we’re here.
For some reason my machine said there was a new upgrade so I installed… big mistake! Thank goodness I have backups. July 2015.
WD makes some great items and some rubbish like the external hard drives… keep them away. I like my WD TV Live and would like it to be even better so if anyone has a recommendation for the better firmware please advise.
The most stable version for me is 2.01.86. I would suggest rolling back to this and turning off auto-updates. Joey has great rollback instructions here.
Yes, it really is a shame that they seem to have given up supporting this unit. I too love it, with the old firmware. One of these days though it will have to go into the junk pile as there is no support for some of the newer codecs/compression. Too bad. I’ve purchased a few of these devices over the years and can understand the early models had hardware limitations. The “Live Streaming” model seems good enough for most things and the latest firmware introduced some nice options, too bad it was unusable for most people. I guess people aren’t buying this “new” any more or we would see more posts as the “current” firmware is so bad. Sure makes me think twice about what to buy next… although I do have a couple of Raspberry Pi sitting around…
Personally, I can understand that sooner or later companies like WD have to stop support for old products. What I can’t forgive though is having the final release of firmware as buggy and unstable. Totally unacceptable to leave users in this state. It has certainly put me off buying anything WD again, it’s a shame they don’t see the harm they do to the company by behaving like this…
Ok folks, I have spent the last couple of weeks following various instructions about how to stop my WDTVLive from freezing up every few minutes and I have finally given up on 2.02.32 - I have just downgraded to 2.01.86 and hopefully this will tie me over until I find a better product by a different company.
Which brings me to my next question: Any recommendations? Let’s face it, WDTVLive is dead, WD don’t give a flying bleep, so they can hardly complain if we now start discussing and comparing the competition, now, can they?
What is there out there that is as good as or even better than this product, may it rest in peace?
BTW - I primarily use it for watching .mkv content off an external drive. I’m not really all that bothered about online content.
I think 2.01.86 is as good as it gets for the WDTV and playing videos from your harddrive works perfectly for me.
But now I’m upgrading my AVR to Dolby ATMOS and DTS:X. Do you think there will be a difference to passing through TrueHD and DTS-HD via HDMI? These are working fine since the last stable firmware update but will my WDTV pass through the ATMOS information as well?
