Feedback after a few months of using the WDTV.
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The UI is slow and clunky. To a point this is unavoidable, but it should be better, even with a slow, passively-cooled processor. There shouldn’t be a delay between every arrow press when navigating the file list.
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No 10-bit h264 support. This is getting very bad: about 75% of what I want to watch is now only available in 10-bit, and I have to jump through hoops to avoid it. (I expect the hardware simply can’t handle it, but this really needs to be addressed in the next product release.)
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Why is getting into Netflix so cumbersome? I can bind a button to the services list, but not to Netflix. It’s got to be by far the most frequently used feature. It should take one button press. I just want to watch TV, not navigate a maze of menus.
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Why is the “featured” list above “favorites”? If I said it’s my favorite, it should be on top.
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The Netflix app is getting worse. All of a sudden, it’s asking me if I want “Just For Kids” … *every* *single* *time*. The WDTV is slow and clunky enough–why are you putting in *new* menus that I have to weave through just to watch TV? I don’t have kids. Ask once, the first time, then remember the last mode viewed and get out of the way.
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Fast forwarding in Netflix is painful compared to on my TV. On my TV, I can press FF there times to fast forward quickly, then RW once or twice to slow the fast-forward back down. On the WDTV, if I press FF three times then RW once, it starts rewinding, so there’s no way to gradually narrow down where I’m trying to seek to. Also, once I press play and it starts buffering, I can’t press FF again to cancel it buffering and go back to seeking, like on my TV. I have to twiddle my thumbs for a while until playback continues.
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SSA support is seriously, painfully broken. It’s so broken that it should never have been listed as a feature ( http://wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=330#tab3)..) The fonts are terrible, it misparses all kinds of things (like {comments}), it doesn’t load embedded fonts at all, it can’t handle multiple captions at once, and so on.
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The marquee for long filenames in the file list is annoying. When I have filenames with episode numbers at the end, I have to sit and wait for each filename to scroll over to see what’s what. When a file is selected and the filename is too long to fit, expand that item in-place to show the whole thing, overlaid on top of the list.
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If I hold the down arrow in the file list (in 2x8 grid mode) to get to the last item in a column, it’ll scroll down 6 times, then suddenly jump forward a whole page instead of going to the last item in the list. This doesn’t help navigating quickly (it takes too long); it’s just confusing and surprising.
(I don’t have much hope of any of this being fixed, since this seems like a place where people point out problems, somebody goes “ticked filed”, and then it goes into a hole somewhere never to be heard from again; but here’s to trying. I’d happily have paid twice as much for the WDTV if it had none of these issues; if it had a responsive, well-thought-out UI and properly handled the media I want to view. Unfortunately, there just don’t seem to be any good alternatives.)
