I had made some comments a while ago on my distrust of certain USB drives where the movies were getting corrupted, and issues when I moved a USB drive back and forth between the WDTVsmp and my Win 7 laptop, files also getting corrupted, even tho I was dismounting the drives correctly.
Well, I think I found the culprit: defrag on Win 7. If I copy and move files around on a drive a lot, I like to defrag the drive. It now appears that defrag was somehow screwing the data up, but ONLY as the WDTVsmp saw it. I never made the association, as not all files got corrupted, and when I did find one that was corrupted it was usually weeks or months after I had done the defrag.
The movie would start to play normally, but then break down, get pixilated, jump ahead, or just stop playing, absolutely repeatable down to the second . If I played the same movie from the same drive on a PC, it played perfectly.
The ‘fix’ for this is to simply copy the movie file (happened with both video_ts and .iso files) to another location, delete the file in the original location, then copy the file back. Once copied back, the movie plays perfectly on the WDTVsmp. Last time I defrag’d the drive, I had many movies that would no longer play, so I’m just copying them all to another drive.
Learned my lesson. No more defragging drives used on the WDTVsmp.
