Hello guys, a month back i enquired WD regarding the MP4 issue. They replied that they are’nt bothered about the old products and there wont be any future FW updates for the WD HD TV (gen 2). What a surprise. We should start bouycotting WD products hereafter.
Is there any solution for this users. Please reply. They are supposed to give us a different product i think…
Pour your ideas users…
While I understand your frustration, you could spend far less time changing your media to something that DOES work compared to spending time working yourself into a lather… 
Use Handbrake and convert your MP4s to MKVs. It’s free, and runs while you’re at sleep or at work.
I think what Tony means is that even if it takes you a million years to convert your whole collection of movies to something the WD can play…that’s considerably less time than it will take WD fix their box to do what they say it does…because they stopped supporting it almost right before they shipped it.
Well, a million years is a bit of exaggeration, by about 7 orders of magnitude.
What I’m saying is that you can sit here and whine and cry all you want and have a brick that does nothing, or you can make it work for you.
Your choice…
well said nijaju, and thats what tony means. If a particular device doesnt support a format properly then it shouldnt be advertised that it will support. Wont this amount to cheating ? The MKV is not a rare format and its becoming familiar day by day. I can also tolerate the time taken for converting, but the resultant converted file looses nearly 30% of its quality. What do you say about this Tony ??
The main purpose of buying a media player is because it supports a plethora of formats and there is no need for converting/re-encoding it to a different format. If this is the case with this device then definetely i would have stayed with my 3 year old dvd player which supports MP4 and divx flawlessly.
Apart from waiting for the conversion time, the clarity is ALSO lost. Very frustrating !!!.
This the 1st and last time i am buying a WD product and surely i wont recommend it to anyone …
SHAME ON YOU WD - YOU UNDOUBTEDLY A DECEIVER
BAD BYE
30% quality loss? Why would that be?
TonyPh12345 wrote:
30% quality loss? Why would that be?
Pulled out of the fourth point of contact, I’d surmise.
At 6MB/frame, an uncompressed file gets huge in no time… your 90-minute 1080 movie “needs” to be 750GB or you’re “losing quality”
How dare the BluRay makers shrink that 750GB down to 20-30 GB !!! They’ve already thrown out 96-98% of the picture information!!!
A different (better) compression scheme couldn’t possibly represent that remaining 2-4% of the picture information in a smaller file. It has to be worse because it’s smaller. Size matters.
Anyway I (and so many loyal users) have invested their hard earned money on this ■■■■ and WD need not release any FW to correct the issues in the device, right ?. The consumers are just fools according to WD. After selling a product who cares about the FW ?. Well WD very smart. Unfortunately i became one among the victims who fell into your trap and lost my peace and money.
anfjavid wrote:
Anyway I (and so many loyal users) have invested their hard earned money on this ■■■■ and WD need not release any FW to correct the issues in the device, right ?. The consumers are just fools according to WD. After selling a product who cares about the FW ?. Well WD very smart. Unfortunately i became one among the victims who fell into your trap and lost my peace and money.
YES! You are right! Your message must be placed on a front page of this site. and this community can be closed at all.
l_-_l wrote:
YES! You are right! Your message must be placed on a front page of this site. and this community can be closed at all.
Calm down. Take a deep breath, and remember this is just a television playback device, not a life-support controller. You recognize that WD won’t be supporting its customers, instead trying to sell new stuff with a whole new set of problems that won’t be resolved. Gen1 purchasers were rapidly abandoned, Gen2 purchasers were quickly abandoned, so there’s no surprise that short EOL cycles are WD’s business and profit model.
You have two choices; follow the advice of the apologists and reconvert all of your files to make them fit the flawed firmware/hardware and blame yourself for the mistake of trying to play a file the specs said it could handle, or cut your losses and abandon WD by purchasing a competing product. I found another product new for $65 after rebate that outspecs a WDTV Live (no, I won’t advertise a competing product here, web searching is your friend), underprices a WDTV refurb, has a wildly vibrant community that has managed to fix issues before the manufacturer, and not only has hacked manufacturer’s firmware available (like the WD does), but the start of true homebrew software, and even has firmware for other boxes running on the hardware, pretty much guaranteeing a long and healthy support life. (This particular box can even be unbricked by the consumer instead of having it sent back to the manufacturer if something goes wrong, which allows a whole lot of freedom in screwing around with the firmware. I doubt that was planned, and I’m sure they won’t use it as a selling point, but it’s really cool anyway.)
Feel free to write WD and tell them you won’t be purchasing any more of their products, including hard drives. Make sure you tell your friends (and strangers, for that matter) about their short support cycles and lack of concern for the customer. Warn your employer’s purchasing department about their lack of support, too, if it makes you feel better. But don’t let it get you so worked up you start posting in all caps…it honestly isn’t worth the increase in blood pressure.
Consider your purchase of a WD device an expensive lesson in which manufacturer to avoid, and warn friends and family about. Move on to better-supported devices, and let other people waste their time working around all of the problems with WD machines while you just watch television.
Should just keep bumping this thread
At this rate, think it will be best if we all went to asus for media player’s… far better update/firmware support and they actualy do as advertised… play the media files they are meant to without stupid little catches.
It’s like you have a stain on your shirt, you buy some vanish as it is meant to remove the stains… you apply it and it makes a bloody great hole in the shirt. Granted the stain has gone but not in the right way! :smileyvery-happy:
I don’t blame you for wanting to jump ship…
But I GUARANTEE you, whatever player you go to, it will have its own set of bugs or limitations… Just go read the ASUS forum and see if they apply to you or not.
EVERY PLAYER is far from perfect. You’ll have to choose the lesser of the devils.
I.M.H.O. For me personally there is nothing that can beat a P.C. tower connected to your flat screen for a hassle free experience of media supping! Codec missing? download it and play! VLC plays virtually everything anyway.
Fit a blu-ray drive and you can play any disk there is out there.networked-internet connected-flash drives-hard drives-you name it it plays it!
Get yourself a wireless keyboard and mouse and surf and stream and download and watch.
Add up all the money we spend on so called Media players buying generation after generation upgrading firmware etc.etc.only to find something it wont play anyway !
You dont need super processing power to surf and download and play even 1080p movies/mp2/mp3/mp4 whatever there is out there you can do it see it listen to it on a pc.
THERE IS NO player out there that does it all.If size bothers you get a desktop tower small as you can find.cheapest processor/motherboard/ram/video card and they mostly have HDMI on them now too !
This is my experience after buying WD first gen media player then an asus o!play with internal HD. and still cant play everything! THIS IS THE ANSWER! Entry level pc does it all ! Take care guys and think about it…
Actually, an “entry-level” PC might not be able to play 1080p cleanly. It all depends on the processor and the memory (and what other ■■■■ is running in the background).
TonyPh12345 wrote:
Use Handbrake and convert your MP4s to MKVs. It’s free, and runs while you’re at sleep or at work.
Do you need to use Handbrake?
Wouldn’t running them through MKVmerge (pre-4.0.0) be much quicker and do the job with no loss of quality?
I have to admit, I’d be more than a little sour if my unit was EOL’d before they finished squashing all the bugs…
Yep, Grant, that’d do it, too!
I have the same problem mp4/audio synch problems and I’ve wasted an annoying amount to time trying to fix this. WD staff have been completely unhelpful and to completely ignore a product in this fashion is typical corporate bollocks.
This is the last time I will ever by a WD product - out of principle if nothing else - and I will tell all of my friends to stay away too.
