Disappointed - What other media player should I buy?

Jesperben wrote:

 

Still, I will advise makers of this kind of products not to go to far in marketing them as no-brainer plug and play’s. The ordinary tv-owner will get lost very quickly.

 

It’s excellent advice.  On WD’s non-tech side I think they really oversold this thing.  With the exception of Apple (whose description of the capabilities and drawbacks of Apple TV is pretty realistic) every other company is guilty of the same thing, but that doesn’t make it right.  These devices are best thought of as tiny computers, with all the complexities that entails.  I wouldn’t give one to my mom (then again, my mom never could get her VCR to stop flashing the wrong time).

There are enough helpful folks here that if someone has the patience and is willing to live with the limitations they can have a truly fine experience with the Live.  But not everyone is patient (or wants to live with the limitations).

mkelly: I wouldn’t give one to my mom (then again, my mom never could get her VCR to stop flashing the wrong time).

I disagree. Once the setup is complete, I found the WD TV Live to be very easy to use, even my retired mother did manage to view the family photos when she was visting us after a short introduction! You don’t need to key in some data like on a VCR, you just click on the icons.

Furthermore, all the stuff that my DLNA server offers can be played by the WD TV Live, so no worries there at all! This is quite unlike the DLNA certified clients integrated in our new expensive TV and BluRay Player, which have massive problems , even with unmodified JPGs taken by an old digitial camera of the same brand (Sony)!

Of course, the DLNA server ignores some media, such as the aforementioned DV videos, which would be to big to stream anyway. However, even some stuff ignored by my DLNA server (Twonky), like H.264 encoded .flv flash video files, can be played directly on the WD TV Live.

Furthermore, my WD TV Live has no USB-storage attached to it. All media arrives via the Ethernet port, if not from the DLNA-Server, then from network shares. I did not have any network problems either. For £90, I am very happy , I must say!

You disagree?  You mean you would give one to my mom?

Sorry, but you obviously don’t know my mom, then . (And remember, my mom is MUCH older than yours.  After all, I’m retired).

(I made the mistake of sending her a Panasonic cordless phone recently and she said she can’t get a signal when she drives away from the house.  I do love her, though).

Sorry, used call-by-name instead of call-by-value, my bad. :wink:

No, I really, I think that operating a VCR is on a much different level than the WD TV Live. All you need to manage for the WD TV Live is 5-way navigation, which is much easier to understand. All icons come with a caption underneath, so even if you do not understand the icons for video and music, you can help yourself along.

Of course, that excludes YouTube, choosing audio channels, etc., but those really are extras.

I should throw my VCR away.   But I just can’t bring myself to go re-invest probably close to $1000 in all the Soft-Sided Disney VHS movies now on DVD and BD…  ;)

I probably should give it a good cleaning and just rip the VHS to digital.   Oh, Wait.   Macrovision!  Ugh…

STurtle wrote:

Sorry, used call-by-name instead of call-by-value, my bad. :wink:

 

No, I really, I think that operating a VCR is on a much different level than the WD TV Live.

All seriousness aside, I think a VCR is MUCH easier than the Live.  You seem to be forgetting some fundamental things (which is the point that I wouldn’t give my mom one).  First: where does the content come from?  Is your mom going to download video files to put on a local hard drive?  Or does she have a home network she is going to stream them from?  My mom would be wondering where to put the DVD in.

I think you’re making a fundamental error if you assume the Live is even CLOSE to being as easy to use and understand as a VCR or DVD player, and that’s what it’s going to play in the first place.  The Live presumes a degree of familiarity with computers and files (and codecs, etc.) that is WAY beyond anyone who is not computer literate.  Even my wife (who was a network guru) has trouble understanding what files play and what won’t on the Live (and wouldn’t have the first clue on how to get content from anywhere, let alone re-encoding a DVD).

It’s likely your crowd is all as computer literate as you are, but trust me the average Amercian is still struggling with how to hook up HDTV (most wouldn’t know what an HDMI cable is if it tripped them).  I get calls from my neighbors all the time just asking me how the heck they can get their TVs to work (they have old composite cables coming from their VCRs and don’t even SEE those inputs on their new sets anymore).   The Live would not be something that 9 out of 10 people could handle, but for the 1 or 2 that CAN it’s an amazingly easy device.

No, I do not consider the average user to provide the content. I regard the WD TV Life like a DVD player. Most people can operate them, but have now idea how to create a DVD.

Content appears automagically: For example, my wife downloads the pictures from her digital camera onto her laptop. This is an easy plug & play task: insert the memory card, wait and remove. They are automatically placed under a certain picture root folder. The laptop regularly backups itself to our NAS. The DLNA-Server on the NAS then automatically picks up any new pictures and makes them available.

Now, my wife does not know anything about this process. However, she does know how to show a certain picture from a certain date on the TV to her friends - because that part is dead easy!

The same applies for the mp3 bought on Amazon & co. They automatically appear. Likewise, you do not need to be an expert if a friend comes along and brings some media on a USB stick. You plug it in and press play - and it plays.

But the Live is first and foremost a video player – just where does your wife automagically get that content?

Nope, I think you don’t have a case there.  Images, perhaps (and not even then – once again, my mom can’t operate a digital still camera to save her life).  But video, absolutely not.

You’re mixing things up: The difficulty of operating a camera is not to blame on the WD TV Live, which is just a player!

If you do not know how to obtain media files, then yes, the WD TV Live might be pretty useless, but the WD TV Live does not add any complexity. Cassette players (many models came without a mic) were useless unless you knew where to buy cassettes or how to record radio transmissions. Of course, it is very difficult to obtain casettes to play nowadays, but your old trusted tape deck is not to blame for that! Operating the tape deck is as simple or difficult as it has always been.

So where does video content from? Its is either downloaded from the web or your camera, and in both cases you just have to place it in a directory that the WD TV Live can reach. Easy. If your camera makes it difficult to download its recorded stuff, then the WD TV Live is not to blame.

No, you’re just confused again but there’s a disconnect here so I’m not going to try beyond this response, as I’m sure others are following me just fine.

Just because you can move objects on a flat surface (like any two year old can) doesn’t mean you can play chess.  And there is nothing easier in the world than playing music on an iPod – but my mom couldn’t operate one any more than half of the people in the U.S. can when you consider that operation also means maintaining and using iTunes software and syncing and operating the iPod in conjunction with this.

I know from experience – I worked the Apple forums when the iPod first came out and you would not believe the tens of thousands of folks who didn’t get it.  And most still don’t – because while the operation of an iPod is a no-brainer once you have the content on it, getting the content on it is still more complicated than the average American can handle.

It’s intellectually dishonest to say the problem is not with the iPod – and Apple, to their credit, DID make it better (the first iterations for Windows required firewire cards but purported to work with USB.  And it did… sort of.  But it was a holy mess and while the basic operation of the iPod controls hasn’t changed in years, they did indeed revamp the whole iTunes experience to make it as easy as possible for people.  Still isn’t foolproof, and still is something my wife has trouble with, but it’s far far better than it was).

WD (and, really, all media players) are in the same boat as the early iPods.  As devices they aren’t hard to operate, but they are worthless without content, and gettting and managing the content is not easy.  In this one regard AppleTV is actually better than the Live (although still not as easy as it could be).  At least you can navigate with ATV to the iTunes store and buy something and then watch it – but that’s not possible with the Live and I’m not sure that even if it was it would really solve the basic problem.

But it really doesn’t matter because all these media players are just stopgap measures.  Someday we’ll have integration to where we don’t know (and don’t care) exactly where the content is coming from, in the same way we don’t have to worry how the content from the TV stations gets to us (do you really care where TBS locates their offices, or how they get their content to your HDTV?).  I may not (probably won’t) be around to see this, but it will come because the vast majority of folks are not technocrats.

Yes, this is getting silly, but your analogy with the ipod does not hold up: As far as I understand it, Apple changed its store, but not the playback device. Unlike Apple, WesternDigital has no control over how we acquire our media.

My parents own a PC, although they cannot install any kind of software themselves. I installed Linux on the PC and have not touched the PC since 5 years, not even remotely. All they do is starting Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. They cannot do anything else, but still they find it useful to have that PC.

My parents have digital photo frame, but no digital camera, since they could not operate it. We send them SD cards with the newest pictures of their grandchildren every now and then, which they just insert. They find it useful.

Similarly, it would be useful to install a WD TV Live in their living room, and send them a USB stick with video of their grandchildren who live far away. They could very well use it easily!

SharpBarb wrote:

I have been looking through the forum and have found many examples of problems that have not been resolved in a timely manner. I just figured with all the complaints and problems on this forum, that many folks would know about a better product.

 

I hope WD reads this thread. I want them to know that I am unhappy with the present state of the device.

Dude, I have gone through FOUR (4) different brands of media players since January, and I can tell you that the WD Live is by far the best one FOR THE PRICE.

 If you want to throw down a couple hundred on a set top box, get a Slingbox or AppleTV, then cry later when you see that they are just as limited in what they do as every other box out there =P

 Or you can come to peace with what you bought, and realize you may have to convert your media, fiddle with your WiFi Settings, and that the WD Live will not, in fact, gently wake you every morning by starting the coffe pot and making your Eggs Benidict, or whatever weird expectation you may have.

 In all seriousness, the WD Live is pretty awesome at least to me, I guess I dodged a lot of the bad firmware bullets so I am coming into this with rose colored glasses, maybe. For what it does, it does it very well, but it’s not an HTPC where you can set weird resolutions, install codecs as needed, or install new stylesheets or themes in XBMC.

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