Both of these issues didn’t exist on the old WDTV Live, or at least not until you messed it up. That proves that it actually is possible to make a WDTV play 1080p nicely, even via network shares.
People primarily buy the WDTV to play HD material on their tv sets via local storage or network. That is what you advertise your device can do. But it doesn’t!
None of these issues were addressed in your latest firmware 1.07.15. And look at the dates of the two issue reports!
Honestly, WD, come on! Look at how far you have come. Look at your competition. I cannot understand why you choose to neglect basic network and playback functionality. If you just fix this you will have a killer product and a lot of happy customers, instead of a crippled device and a lot of frustrated customers.
Take a look a these forums. Are people 99% happy with your product, or is it the other way around?
i dont get any issues with any file formats. all mkv’s work fine and have done on all firmwares thats ive used. Could it be the settings in your encoding program you are using??
i know others have had this issue too but many others also have had none.
There are a lot of things I could complain about but 1080p over WiFi in auto framerate matching mode works absolutely fine for me. Is there another device eating up your network bandwith?
The network bug has to do with peaks in bitrate that the SMP can’t handle because it apparently has no buffer handling when streaming over network. Some of my 720p files also provokes this network stuttering because of higher than usual bandwidth peaks. These same files played without problems on my old WDTV Live.
The other stuttering bug has to do with certain codecs in certain container files. Again, the files played flawlessly on my old WDTV Live.
Click the links to the two issue reports in the first post for more details.
Same problem here - MKV files playing great on my old wdtv live - Stuttering on the new wdtv streaming.
I think I will sell the streaming on ebay and see if apple come up with a decent version of Apple tv tomorrow (apart from the ipad 3 announcement) - or otherwise switch to popcorn?
I ran the test and my network is all in the green. It’s a Windows 7 machine cabled to the SMP via an Airport Extreme. I had the same setup with the WDTV Live and that worked just fine. I still regret giving the WDTV Live to a friend.
Thanks for the input, but again, my setup is not the problem. The SMP’s firmware is the problem. See the two links. It has to do with bitrate peaks and 1080p handling of mkv’s at 24p refresh rate. The files that the SMP struggles with played just fine on the previous WDTV Live. Only WD can fix this.
I am having the same problem with HD files using both mkv and m2ts. The files are being played locally from a hard drive connected via usb (western digital may i add)
There appears to be the occasional slight stutter which seems to be in the same place on the files concerned.
Considering the primary function of this unit is to be a HD media player, kind of makes it look bad.
Must admit the reviews on amazon are starting to look a little negative. When will they get the message?
i have finally got this thing working, why won’t it stream some files over network share?? they are only basic avi they will play over local storage? this device is really painful to use. plus cannot get it to work over tversity!!
The only downside to using TVersity is if you run it from a Windows machine that is set to go into sleep/hibernation after a certain time.
TVersity is programmed in a way that doesn’t prevent Windows from going into sleep/hibernation while TVersity is streaming (wow… nice wotk TVersity!). So if you don’t want to be interrupted by a sleeping Windows server while watching movies, you either have to make sure that the sleep/hibernation interval is longer than the length of a movie and that you recently did some sleep timer interrupting thing on the Windows machine before streaming from TVersity, or you could turn off the sleep/hibernation timer altogether.
Remember to turn off transcoding in TVersity’s setup!!!
So, until WD fixes the network share bug (if they ever do), TVersity, or some other media server, is the only way to stream high bitrate files to the SMP.
BUT that doesn’t solve the problem, because you still have the OTHER bug that cripples HD playback, and that is the infamous MKV stutter bug (that WD also haven’t found important enough to fix in several firmware versions!) This one is a real daisy because there is no workaround. Apparently you just have to live with really annoying choppy frame drops. It looks a bit like when you try to play HD mkv files on an older and underpowered computer that can’t keep up. I guess the same thing is happening on the SMP because of sloppy programming.
It’s a bit sad. The SMP could have been a great device. Let’s hope that some day WD pulls their finger out of a certain orifice and fixes this before abandoning the SMP for new hardware.
OR AT LEAST TELLS US WHETHER THEY PLAN TO FIX IT OR NOT? - Nudge, nudge
thanks for that… should i update to the new firmware on the wd player? i have just tried playing tversity 1.9.3! there is no difference i keep getting this error in tversity… Error - Could not execute SQL statement, reason: unrecognized token: "" and the wd says no media in current folder!!! WD are F*cking useless!!!
If you haven’t updated the firmware yourself, just stay with the factory firmware. Chances are it works better than newer versions.
Strange with TVersity 1.9.3. The error you are describing is exactly the one I got with all the newer versions. It was only when I downgraded to 1.9.3 that things started to work.
Did you completely uninstall and delete the newer versions before installing 1.9.3?
BTW, are you on wireless og cabled network? If you are on cabled network, you should be able to play most files via network share. Only the most bitrate heavy files like high quality HD mkv files triggers the network stutter bug.
