I’m using a WD TV Live to play video files off my WD Passport portable hard drive. I’m mostly satisfied except that recently I’ve had a lot of trouble playing video files. I’m pretty sure it’s just a codec problem but whenever my WD TV tries to play a video file it doesn’t support I get the “unsupported format” error message and it erases the file from my hard drive immediately. When I plug my hard drive into my computer, the file name is still there but it suddenly has 0 KB and the file no longer exists at all.
I can keep working on a solution to why some files won’t play, but it’s frustrating to lose the files completely just because the player can’t play it.
How can the WD TV player just delete files like that? Is anyone else having this problem? Is there anything that can be done?
if you don’t you’re begging for these type of problems
this is not WD specific, this is on any computer
oh and WD, when powered down, is just sleeping, it’s not off, so you must use the eject feature prior to turning off the unit, if you plan to remove the drive
sheholt >>>> When I plug my hard drive into my computer, the file name is still there but it suddenly has 0 KB and the file no longer exists at all.
This has happened to others (including me). As stated above, you HAVE to properly eject the drives before removing them from the WD. This is not always possible if the WD freezes and you have to pull the plug. So, before pulling the power/plug, wait until any drives have stopped and gone to sleep mode if possible, or if that won’t happen, then give the drive a minute or so to settle down.
So, eject the drive, put it on your computer, have Windows scan it for errors, thoroughly search for and DELETE any zero-byte files, and delete the wd_tv database folder. If you have backups of the damaged files put them on the drive at this time. When this is done, re-attach the drive to the WD which will search the drive and will re-write the wd_tv folder. You are back in business.
Fortunately, in my case, I had backups of the damaged files, so all was well again. Problem hasn’t resurfaced in a year or so since. Nevertheless, I periodically look through the drive for any zero-byte files in case it has happened again.
if you don’t you’re begging for these type of problems
this is not WD specific, this is on any computer
oh and WD, when powered down, is just sleeping, it’s not off, so you must use the eject feature prior to turning off the unit, if you plan to remove the drive
That’s just not true. Unplugging it without ejecting should only affect writing TO the disc (i.e. the .wd_tv folder), but NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER result in deleted media files. Not in a million years. Especially not with journaling filesystems like NTFS. Once again, sloppy coding on WD’s side.
how do you properly eject your external hard drive from WD TV Live? I know how to eject from my computer but can’t figure out how to eject from the WD unit. Thanks.
From my Experience: the files aren’t actually “Deleted”
Back in the old days of my Original WDTV Gen 1, i went to play some movies of my then 120GB Seagate drive attached via USB to the WD Device. No Media Found
Plugged into my PC … Sure enough all the files were gone.
But, in PC settings Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management … The drive was there.
So, with nothing more to lose … I deleted the Partition and Quick Reformatted the Drive.
Then ran GetDataBack NTFS to attempt to recover my Movies…
A few hours later i successfully recovered 100% of all my movies.
Over the next Year and a Half … This happened on 2 or 3 occasions with other drives (even bigger ones) even when I always had “Ejected” the drive (or so i thought ?)
So i can only guess it’s the MBR (Master Boot Record) that gets corrupted on the drives (the Movies files are safely intact … Unless of course you write to the drive after it’s happened … Then you won’t get 100% recovery)
So, basically if it happens …
(1) Don’t Panic
(2) Have a spare HDD to Recover the files to
(3) Find something to do while the Recovery process is working (It can take a long time)
Yep, I’ve had the same thing happen multiple times, ever month or two it blows away a bunch of recently-added files. Very frustrating. I’m always on the latest firmware (1.13.18 as of today), has persisted across the last few updates.
I have no awareness of the deleted files being unplayable format, although (separate issue) I do occasionally get files falsely reported as being ‘unplayable format’ that then play fine after a re-boot.
I’ve normally found it easier to re-copy the files rather than runnig ‘undelete’ software, but this latest bunch I had no backup of, so I may give it a shot.
Would be great to hear from anyone else suffering the same problem, or comment/solutoin from WD.
JoeySmyth wrote:
So, with nothing more to lose … I deleted the Partition and Quick Reformatted the Drive.
Then ran GetDataBack NTFS to attempt to recover my Movies…
Which makes no sense at all. You don’t EVER write (format/delete) to a drive you try to recover data from. You only read from it and save the recovered files to another HDD. I’m weirded out it worked for you.
That said, deleting data is a huge no-no WD should fix ASAP. However I never had any such problems, maybe because I’m not using the media library so the SMP is not writing to my HDD?! The only problem I had was inaccessible folders that I cured by manually ejecting the drive before shutting the WDTV off.
This has happened with every flash drive, every reboot, every eject, every time I search for a movie. It’s gotten to be a crapshoot to see if I’ll be able to watch anything off my SMP. I NEVER attach a drive that has my only copy of a movie file. I don’t trust it to be there ever again.
What happens with me is that the SMP is corrupting the boot sector of my flash drives so that Windows Explorer will only see them as unformatted drives when I plug them in. This is not an occasional problem, it’s a chronic problem. I’ve reformatted my drives so many times I’m surprised they still work.
And then comes the crapshoot to see if the SMP will even recognize the file format and/or codec. If I try streaming MKVs across my home network, forget it. Copy it to a flash drive, same file, same codec, voila! It plays. Sometimes. Sometimes I have to eject, reformat on my computer when it tells me that’s my only option, re-copy the movie files to the dirve and plug back in and voila! It works. Sometimes. And if even sometimes, it won’t be long before the SMP tells me there’s no local storage attached.
Shall I rant on about subtitles? There for one viewing, not there for the next. Over the network–forget it. It’s easier to find someone to watch it with you who understands the language and have him or her translate for you than try to find the subtitle stream.
I like the idea of this device, but its glitchiness is SO frequent and predictable, I no longer recommend it to anyone. Especially those who are tech-phobic to begin with. This is a device that trains its owners how to work around its flaws, not the other way around.
garkula wrote:
I like the idea of this device, but its glitchiness is SO frequent and predictable, I no longer recommend it to anyone.
It’s not which is exactly the problem in fixing this bug. I don’t experience ANY of those issues you do, neither on
the Live on 1.06.43 nor the SMP on 1.13.18. No media corruption, all files play fine (from USB and network share) and subtitles are fine (PGS, VobSub, SRT).
I have two WD TV Live players with the latest firmware and each unit ha a 3tb wd drive attached for the last three weeks since my server died and i am finding that i now have lots of files that have been converted to folders and can not be played.
The drives are not removed from the WD TV Live ever so it is not an eject problem.
The External drives were a backups of the server drives and the original files are still available on the server.
It has only happened since being attached to the WD TV Live.
Got same problem with John. The movie is gone after play. its only left with empty folder. Weird thing is, the HDD file size still the same but movies are missing. Now, there are 15 movies missing. WHat to do ?
