Is My WD TV Live Toast?

I’ve had my TV Live for about 15 months and it has been a great device.  I recently started streaming music to it from my PC and that has worked very well.  In fact, yesterday I did it all day, then in the evening decided to watch a TV show I have in MP4 format.  Something I have done many times.  It’s running the latest firmware.

Starting the video all went as usual until I selected the file and the screen went black, then it started to play, then it gave a “unsupported file format” and I tried to pause without success, then it gave a “no files found” with my NAS as the source which is full of files.  When I couldn’t stop it or get back to the main menu I let it sit, thinking it would eventually clear.  It did stop but was unresponsive to the remote.  I unplugged it for a few minutes and when I plugged it in this was the result:

“WD TV Live cloud screen with “Loading” – 10 sec black screen – WD TV Live cloud screen – 10 sec black screen – blue “No Signal” screen – start all over again”

So I did a Reset - twice with the same result.  The Live is stuck in a loop.

Is there anything else I can do to recover this from whatever happened, or is it likely a hardware failure?  I did have it sitting on my Slingbox so it was a bit hot.  Won’t do that again.

I have a similar problem: During the playback of any random type of video file (it happens with more than just avi or mkv, but mp4 and others too) it freezes. The ONLY thing that will clear it is to unplug/re-plug the Hub from its power. The on/off button doesn’t work.

I’ve also had my Hub go through cycling Loading… - blue screen - Loading… cycle just like you. The only thing to stop it was to unplug/plug it back in, sometimes repeatedly. Other times the Loading… screen will come on for several tens of minutes before finally getting to HOME.

Freezing appears most often after a long pause - when the Hub has gone into screen-saver mode - but not always, & it’s a pain in the butt because after a freeze & a power cycle, you’ve lost your place/have to guess how long you’ve been playing the file.

I’m running the latest version of firmware. I’m accessing the files from both an NAS320, a Windows7 share, USB stick and its own internal drive - it makes NO difference (which is why I think it’s a Hub issue).

Additionally - this started happening SEVERAL firmware upgrades ago and other threads that I’ve read have mentioned that resetting it back to factory defaults (previous firmware versions) did NOT help

to rule out network issues,

should put a file on thumdrive, or internal drive

disconnect the WD completely from your network, factory reset, then reboot

leave it disconnected from the network and try to play the file from thumdrive

It happened to me thrice, the one after rebooting then blue screen no signal part, what I did was remove the the plug of the tv then insert again,then power on the tv. I then saw that the wd smp was loading, I think what you feel that smp was freezed is because we cant see whats happening. I have no explaination why sometimes suddenly after reboot wd smp wont provide signal via hdmi to the tv.

Final Update: Received a new Live SMP today. Installed it without ethernet connection, but wifi, and upon reboot it did EXACTLY the same thing as the previous one did. Booting and rebooting. What a **bleep**. I switched the HDMI port - didn’t help. Was going to try analog video when the wife, who knows nothing about computers, says “why don’t you reboot the router”. Well, that fixed it and the SMP proceeded with the install. So I pulled it off and re-installed my old one and it worked again, although since I had done a reset on it I had to set up everything again.

I have no idea why the router connection, even on the new one via wi-fi, would cause this problem. So, when in doubt reboot the router! I’ll be returning the new one to Amazon and not happy about having to do that. Thanks for the help and I hope my problem may help someone else down the line.