Feature Request: Text input to facilitate navigation of 1,000's media files

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

I’m up and running and have happily loaded my new device with ~500Gig of media and other backups. This appears to be a great device and I really love some of the other Services that come packaged with the product, including Netflix, Pandora and MediaFly.

This device is clearly an AppleTV killer and leaves Roku far, far behind. (I’ve used both extensively.)

Much to my chagrin, however, all of my local media files remain virtually inaccessible because of the limitations of the WD user interface. Being forced to scroll, page by page, through 1000’s of albums, songs and titles is exceedingly cumbersome, even with the WD “filter” tools.

Especially when compared to the primitive 3-button AppleTV remote, the WD TV Live Hub remote is much more sophisticated and feature rich. With the alphanumeric keypad, it shouldn’t be a huge code upgrade for WD to offer enhanced searching capability with text input.

I spoke to Tech Support (Ray) about this issue and he was going to log it on their feature request system too. He even suggested that I *may* be able to plug in a USB keyboard to enable such a text query. (I plan to try it but I’m still not convinced I’ll find the solution I’m looking for, especially since the existing remote already has a keypad of its own.)

Has anyone else experienced this limitation or thought about the idea of utilizing text input to facilitate navigating media libraries?

If anyone has a workaround, fix or expected product updates to address this feature request, please reply here.

Thanks,

-Matt

2

You can plug in a USB keyboard and input text on the search screen. You can even use certain wireless keyboards.

3

Tried the keyboard and it works… sort of.

Yes you can input text to the query/search field. You can also use the page up/down and tab keys to navigate through some of your media. There are apparently a number of keyboard shortcuts (e.g. mute, play, stop) but I have no idea where the key-to-function map exists. In any case, that’s as far as I could get with the keyboard.

The problem (inconvenience) is that one cannot type a letter and have the list automatically scroll down to the title/album that begins with that letter or - even better - find all matching results for whatever key sequence you type.

At this point, the simple button on the remote will have to suffice but perhaps the developer team at WD will take note of my request and upgrade their OS.

Just a thought.