New Firmware?!?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Media Player
1

Wow, I see that after 2 years, we have a firmware update. Shame that it mostly seems to be about wiping out half of the apps on the WDTV. Although that doesn’t really bother me as I don’t use any of those anyway.

Anyone installed this firmware yet, and want to give feedback. Does it actually reduce the functionality/reliability like the last one did?

Thanks,

Chris.

2

EDIT
Whoops, wrong subforum, nevermind.

3

haha! beat me to it… :slight_smile:

4

Ditto your question. Now let’s see who (whose WDTV is perfect) is brave enough…

5

I did one this morning and seemed to work okay. Need to read what they changed

6

I Just updated and Pandora and Hulu apps have been removed. Netflix is still there not sure what else has been discontinued

8

I did update today and WOW. Double faster, more fluent, and finally it works as it should a year ago.
It starts much faster, load menu and apps faster…
From my point of view this is great!
I am not a heavy user, usually streaming files from network NAS, but I notice a difference.

9

Hi, Could you elaborate a little please. What is faster, the menus, opening files, etc. Also what do you mean by more fluent. I would like to do the update to get rid of the nag screen but I want to make sure it doesn’t screw up anything and also that its worth doing it.

Thanks,
Gerry

10

Everything is faster!
I have WD TV for around year and a half. This is third firmware since I bought it. I updated to the previous right after purchase.
I used to wait for around 1 to 2 minutes to start device. It often didn’t want to start at once, but I had to turn off the power cable and then try again. But in 80% I could not start device by pressing red power button on the remote and had to ‘restart’ it first (power cable off then on).
Now it starts in less than minute. I get WD screen and it is on. For me this is wow!
Navigating through the menu is faster. Starting applications is faster. Browsing though the files located on the NAS is faster. For me it is like I wanted to be from the time I bought it.

P.S. Someone asked if YouTube lean back is working. I can confirm it is working even after firmware update.
I rarely used some of the services (apps) but almost always (90%) was playing files via NAS. They excluded some apps, but Picasa is still there - useless. As far as I am informed, Picasa is officially shot down.

11

Be warned.
Just upgraded the firmware and now my WD elements USB drive is not recognised.
It will detect a thumb drive but nothing else.
Might try doing a manual update to see if this gets resolved.
If not I’ll be rolling back!

Anyone else with the same issues?

Update:
Checked the WD elements drive on my computer and it has been trashed. Reformatted and reloaded all the media files back on, plugged it in to the media player and it works.

Since all was fine before the firmware upgrade, in future I will make sure I unplug any USB drives first.

12

Netflix now wont work after updating with this firmware. Still trying everything; but nothing has worked yet. You tube still doesn’t work despite it saying something about fixing it.
Main thing is Netflix stuffing up. have a chromecast somewhere that I’ve never used; now I’ll have to grab it out the cupboard & set it up, or I’m paying Netflix for nothing…grateful if anyone has a way of rolling back this update to the previous version. Tried resetting the unit, but it makes no difference. tried using the up up up down down down sequence to try and deactivate; but when the screen comes up, it doesn’t give any options to deactivate…wish I’d ignored the firmware update!

13

Thank you for that, magus363. I too use WD Elements for most of my media, so I made sure to follow your advice and unplugged it during upgrade.
Had no problem with regard to Elements, I completed WDTV upgrade, then switched WDTV and computer off, plugged Elements back in (Elements immediately showed on computer), switched WDTV back on (expecting to have to tell it where my media library was stored) and was surprised and pleased to find that WDTV retained its remembrance of where my media library is.
I would run the “sfc /scannow” command at command prompt administrator just for good measure and then follow the (several good posts) advice you can easily search for on here about getting external hard drives recognised by WDTV. Let us know.

14

The WD TV player I am using has never had Netflix, so I guess we are talking about different models here. Although, the firmware might be available for multiple versions.

15

There’s a new thread here now spec. to do with the new upgrade interfering with Netflix.

16

I have been using WD TV for couple of days since last firmware update and OMG! It is great. Like a new device that I have.
Now I can say it is at least 5-10 times faster.
It is faster while: starting, browsing apps, browsing files, playing files, jumping to the specific time on video…
For me this is 10+
I doubt I will ever update firmware again in order not to get it slowly as it was before. Finally (after year or more since I bought it) it works as I expected it to work from the start.

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No more h264 support. :angry:

18

Wrong.

19

How’s that? All my vids are h264 and I haven’t seen any change, they play as before the firmware update.

20

Agree a bit about the menu navigation speed, but mine hasn’t improved 5-10 times.

The only issue I had was having the box dump me to the main screen when hitting play on a file, that and still getting a ton of ‘pink screens’ until I reset the hdmi connection…

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21

No faster or slower than before but lots of restarts and it keeps losing network share.

It was a long wait for this update and it just made a very basic device a bit less reliable.

I’d say I’d never buy one again but I haven’t tried anything better, other than a box supplied by my old French ISP.

1 Like