Netflix and Hulu stereo audio

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

With recent releases of firmware, I’ve been forced to manually switch the audio between Digital and Stereo, depending upon whether the Netflix movie is in 5.1 or not.  Left in Digital mode (using either HDMI or Optical), the WDTV Live Plus seems to downmix plain stereo to mono.  Just tried Hulu and the same problem seems to exist, although I couldn’t quite tell if I ever got real stereo.

Am I missing something?  Anyone found a reasonable workaround?

It occurs to me that maybe analog audio output will get stereo even when set to Digital, but I haven’t yet tried that hookup. Anyone know?

(Yes, I could go back to a much earlier firmware version, when the Optical output seemed to always get stereo, but I like most of the other changes in the latest versions.)

2

Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support

http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

3

Ok, did so, and this was the response:

“We apologize for the difficulties. With the latest firmware update, the changes to the Netflix Service on this media player were made to adhere the requirements on Netflix Service for TV connected devices. Please verify the same movies that no longer have 5.1 audio output on your computer to verify the available audio outputs.”

Can you tranlate this for me?