I recently updated my wdtv live smp to the lastest firmware and noticed unlike the masses that my movie thumnails looks more degraded than the previous ‘out of the box’ firmware, while not a huge issue it is annoying.
I did a full rest of the unit to see if this may fix the issue but what happened next was even worse.
At the moment the primary function of the unit is to play back movies sourced from my many USB external drives, I have no need for the Network functions at the moment so the device was never set up for either Wireless or LAN.
Anyway, after the hardware reset the unit contantly ‘looked’ for a wireless network to setup, if it could not find one it rebooted, no matter how many times it could not find a network, this obviously hindered me getting through the setup and skipping network setup (as was acheived out of the box). finally I brought the device to a friend who has a network and at least I could get to the ‘SKIP’ part.
All aside the WDTV LSMP is good value and works well, but the thumbnails on my unit are worse than before but I don’t wanna hardware reset, as I will be repeating the above. I also like that .mkv files with header compression don’t seem to cause problems like with my older GEN2.
I think most people here have just come to accept that the thumbnail cover art looks like someone puked all over their monitor and re-arranged the bits to form an image. These media players do not use very powerful chips so if I’m not mistaken the jpg’s that the SMP generates for the cover art are not the correct size to fit your screen. The SMP uses a cached image smaller than what is required. This cached image is then blown up on screen thus causing the horrid quality you see before you. WD intentionally did this to boost performance of the UI.
What was your ‘out of the box’ FW? Mine was 1.03.
You need an Internet connection to download your cover art thumbnails/backdrops/synopsis etc.
You could always try a FW rollback, but you can only go back to 1.04, and I’d bet that your stock firmware was before 1.04. Seeing as how you care about the cover art issue - check my forum signature URL link - kudos the author and write something please, so we can get it fixed.
Yes the ‘Out of the box’ FW was indeed 1.03, No idea why the actual TN’s degraded with the current FW, even though it mentions that it ‘Resolved’ this issue. although I am well aware of the unit’s cache method & display on a typical large Monitor. perhaps I need to look at my TV’s setings…
I should point out the the Images I am using per film is exactly named EG: my.film.mkv - my.film.jpg
