I’m tired of it. I can’t believe how buggy these devices are. It’s a great player for local content over my LAN; rock solid. It’s OK for Netflix, although a bit sluggish.
Youtube? It’s like running alpha firmware. When it does work, it’s very sluggish and struggles with playing the ads, then starts out on low resolution despite having plenty of Internet bandwidth. If I pause a video, it loses audio for a time when resuming. It sometimes crashes and reboots when playing, and this is not just one unit but both of mine. Yesterday the audio sounded tinny on every video I played until I rebooted it. Yesterday I got a low memory message. It’s ridiculous.
It’s clear these are firmware issues. WDC support likes to make it sound like it’s something I’m doing, or maybe that the unit is defective. But no, there’s memory leaks or something similar all over the place. It’s sad because some real effort towards bug fixes would go a long ways. I can tolerate how long it takes them to start up from no power, or some sluggishness. But the malfunctions and crashes are unacceptable. And yes, I’m running the latest firmware, and yes, previous FW versions have had some pretty bad bugs too.
I’ve already ordered two Fire TV boxes. WD has abandoned these, and there’s no hope. My bad experiences with WD hard drives makes me want to simply avoid any Western Digital products entirely. I hope my experience with the Fire is better; I’m confident it couldn’t be worse.
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