I am kind of disappointed with the performance of my WD TVLIVe and was wondering if switching hook-ups might help. Right now I am hooked up directly through cat5 and my PC and here are the thingis I don’t like:
~The Live takes about 3 minutes to recognize my network.
~I don’t like that I have to share everything and somethings I don’t want to share show up. I know how to fix this, but it seems combersom.
~When I fast forward then hit play, it takes about ten seconds for the movie to start playing agin; mostly this happens on ~1080p movies, 720 start pretty much right away.
~If my omputer is doing anythihng, generally downloading from internet, the movie will stutter.
if I hooked up an external hardrive driectly to the USB port in the LIve, might that improve any of these issues?
Hooking up an External HDD would fix the 1st, 2nd and 4th issue for sure. I suspect it would also resolve the 3rd issue to some degree (navigating 1080p files involves juggling a lot of data, there will always be a short pause before play resumes).
Longer answer.
For the 1st issue (3 minutes to see network), after turning on the Live, don’t immediately try to navigate the network. Give it 30 seconds or so. I find that immediately accessing the Network Shares after boot-up causes the Live to not see the network and then it takes several minutes before it’ll work.
For the 2nd (network shares), you are the master of your own network and security settings. The Live can’t auto-magically decide what you do or don’t want shared. It is a pain sometimes but set aside an hour or two at the weekend for organising and sharing your media how you really want to. Once it’s done, it’s done and will no longer be an issue. ;)
For the 3rd point, I pretty much explained that in the short version. :)
Most of my media is 720p; I do own a 1080p plasma TV but until recently had limited storage so chose 720p (also, I use wireless-G and 720p streams better). It generally navigates quite quickly and resumes fast enough for me. 1080p should stream fine on Cat5 cable… I’d assume navigation would be quick too but as I already mentioned, it’s a LOT of data and there will always be a small lag before play resumes even in the best conditions.
For the final point… do you have a really slow computer? Or more likely, you’re trying to write to a HDD at the same time as you stream an HD movie. That’s asking a lot. If you have several HDDs in your PC (as I do), you can get around that problem by downloading to a different HDD than the one storing the movies you want to stream.
Let me add something to Grant’s excellent explanation.
You mention “downloading from the itnernet” – a regular download shouldn’t be much of an issue, but if you are doing bit torrents (with something like eMule) you’re cloging up your net with both up and downloads and will bring almost any net to a crawl UNLESS you cap the streams (you can do this easily in eMule but the defaults are set way too high for most people).
It’s kind of like a water main – there’s only so much water going through the pipe, and if you choose to try and put out a huge fire you will get a trickle when you water the plants at the same time. The easy answer is don’t run any file sharing software (or, if you’re going to do it, do it when you’re asleep or at work).
Let me add something to Grant’s excellent explanation.
You mention “downloading from the itnernet” – a regular download shouldn’t be much of an issue, but if you are doing bit torrents (with something like eMule) you’re cloging up your net with both up and downloads and will bring almost any net to a crawl UNLESS you cap the streams (you can do this easily in eMule but the defaults are set way too high for most people).
It’s kind of like a water main – there’s only so much water going through the pipe, and if you choose to try and put out a huge fire you will get a trickle when you water the plants at the same time. The easy answer is don’t run any file sharing software (or, if you’re going to do it, do it when you’re asleep or at work).
Network shouldn’t be the bottleneck here unless his internet speed matches his network speed. Unless he has fast inernet around say 10mbps and a really slow network, say around 10mbps, this shouldn’t be a problem. More likely, the hard drive is the bottleneck.
thank you for the thorough explinations; problably the best i have ever gotten.
II download through newsgroups, not torrents. I have comcast that at hits about 10-14mbps. my cat5 is is whatever it is - I don’t know - and I am not connected thorugh a router, just directly thorugh my ethernet port and I get my internet via my separeate wireless-g - i did it this way due to the problems I have seen on these forums with the wireless networks. I have a western digital caviar black edition which is pretty fast, but it is (for now) my primary hard drive that I partiioned. I am about a week away from adding a second 1tb disc and that will be stand-alone. I guess I am trying to figure out if I want to put that new drive into an external case or just slap it into my PC and keep the cat5.
FYI: I bought this device 99% for accessing movies that were on my computer - internet access (Youtube, etc) is not a huge issue.
Speed on your CAT5 doesn’t matter cause the LIVE only has 100mbit which is ~ 11 MB/s so of course you’re always faster with USB which gets to ~30 MB/s.
