Well done with the Neflix exit…I like it!
Thanks a lot, Bill.
If I may, I suggest the following sequence for restarting:
Restart modem and router first, then the PC, and THEN the WD media player. This sequence has always worked best for me.
These comments were posted over in the WD (Old) Live forum where they, too, are experiencing the Firmware Upgrade Blues. Note that the player did not brick, and the Kudos given by responder for the quality of firmware 1.05.04, and I agree!
zaphod456 wrote:> I reverted back to 1.05.04. (It did not break my WDTV player)
The best firmware for the WD TV live. Fast, stable and with no frills.
_______
MrGreen
WD TV folder icons: www.pixelclan.de
Bill, that procedure that you describe does make the network shares show up. There are a few different ways to get the shares to show up. That is not the problem. When I shut off my Live Plus and turn it on again, the network shares do not show up again unless I go into network settings and re-setup the network. If I choose Settings->Network-> Setup Network->Automatic, then the Windows shares show up. The next time that I turn the device off and on, the shares are gone again.
As I said, when I power off the Live Plus and turn it on again, Windows shares do not show up, however, the Live Plus is connected to the Network. Netflix and the other internet apps work fine, however, Windows shares do not show up until I set up the network again as I have described above.
When I go into the network setup to select Automatic, I can see that the IP Address, Sub Net Mask, Gateway, and DNS are already set up correctly, however I have to choose Automatic again in order for the Windows shares to show up. After I select Automatic, the IP Address, Sub Net Mask, Gateway, and DNS stay the same as they were before I select Automatic, however that makes the Windows Shares available in the Network Shares list.
Note: After upgrading to 1.06.42_B, I reset to factory defaults and re-entered all of my setup information again. Also, I have reset my modem and router multiple times. The problem is still there.
I had the same problem with the 1.06.42 release, Network Shares wouldn’t work, so every time I turned on my WDTV Live Plus I had to go into Settings>Network and Automatic and let the box find the network. This was a pain in the butt to do every time.
But worse is the 30 seconds to 1 minute to get an .AVI file to play or resume from a FF or RW. This firmware made .AVI files unwatchable over a network as others have mentioned.
I just rolled back to 1.06.16_B and it’s fixed both problems.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5800
Too bad the 1.06.42 firmware is a failure with Network Shares and AVI files, because it does fix the problem with the .16b firmware where it will not auto detect that my plasma TV is 1080p (always sets to 720p) so I have to force the setting. But that’s easy, set it once and forget it. Not being able to play .AVI files or Network Shares is a MUCH bigger issue.
Following the upgrade the following has been noticed. Hulu and Netflix flake out over wireless and I can no longer hear audio for MPG’s that are streamed over the network. This “update” has definitely hindered my experience.
Major playback issues on this firmware version. Use to work perfect, after the update all MKV large 1080p files atfter 10 minutes start to play very choppy, no sound, i need to rewind a little bit then press play and it continues for another 5 minuts and happens again… this never used to happen, something is wrong with this firmware… please fix it…
Updated a week ago. Mistake! WD TV Live will only playback at all after hard resetting… otherwise, when selecting a file to watch, you just get the loading circle forever.
Youtube Leanback is, well, **bleep**.
Scandy wrote:
Bill, that procedure that you describe does make the network shares show up. There are a few different ways to get the shares to show up. That is not the problem. When I shut off my Live Plus and turn it on again, the network shares do not show up again unless I go into network settings and re-setup the network. If I choose Settings->Network-> Setup Network->Automatic, then the Windows shares show up. The next time that I turn the device off and on, the shares are gone again.
As I said, when I power off the Live Plus and turn it on again, Windows shares do not show up, however, the Live Plus is connected to the Network. Netflix and the other internet apps work fine, however, Windows shares do not show up until I set up the network again as I have described above.
When I go into the network setup to select Automatic, I can see that the IP Address, Sub Net Mask, Gateway, and DNS are already set up correctly, however I have to choose Automatic again in order for the Windows shares to show up. After I select Automatic, the IP Address, Sub Net Mask, Gateway, and DNS stay the same as they were before I select Automatic, however that makes the Windows Shares available in the Network Shares list.
Note: After upgrading to 1.06.42_B, I reset to factory defaults and re-entered all of my setup information again. Also, I have reset my modem and router multiple times. The problem is still there.
Thanks Scandy. I’ve seen this with a couple of different users. I will report it.
mike27oct wrote:
Thanks a lot, Bill.
If I may, I suggest the following sequence for restarting:
Restart modem and router first, then the PC, and THEN the WD media player. This sequence has always worked best for me.
You’re right. It may take doing those as well.
None of that works as a permanent fix to this network issue.
Now granted I am on 1.06.16_B but it’s still the same issue. You can reboot, reset anything you like. The fix is there but only temporarily. Soon as you turn off your WDTV player, all that goes bye-bye and when you start up your player again, the network issue is back. Something is seriously broken with these firmwares when it comes to networking. It seems to only have gotten worse as the updates come along.
I notice for some that just going into settings and resettijng things works, but for me it doesnt. I have to reboot my router in order to see network shares. What’s strange though is when I cant see network shares, I can go over to my PC and click on networks and see my WDTV and click on it and go into my elements drive that is hooked up to the WDTV (USB)
How can I see into the player through network from PC but not see into the PC through that same network ?
I really hope this gets fixed soon. Maybe WD needs to contact B_Rad for some help … ?
So… I see the latest firmware is getting all the love it deserves. And, while I am not experiencing most of these network issues people are reporting, I have noticed one little weird and mildly frustrating problem. While streaming various avis over the network I find it will start to load them but just stay at 00:00 on the timer until I fast-forward a bit. Then I have to pause and un-pause it a few times before it will actually begin playing on it’s own. Yay.
I’ve also noticed on YouTube Leanback that sometimes the video will freeze while the audio continues to play normally. Then you seem to need to pause it and start playing again to “nudge” the video along and it starts playing. Was sort of weird when I was watching some video and didn’t realize for about ten minutes it was frozen. When it started playing again it was playing at like 5X normal speed and eventually caught up with the audio and resumed playing normally. No biggie but… yay.
Other than that I’ve had Hulu+ flake out randomly and suddenly stop playing, dumping me to the main Hulu menu. (I have to say I absolutely HATE the Hulu menu… it’s SOOO much fun sifting through THOUSANDS of videos one at a time to find something to watch. I mean, like, CATAGORIES? Why the **bleep** would I want something like THAT!? :womanmad:)
But, like, I am not even worrying about stuff like this. I gave up on WD loooooong ago even if I do still use this device. Basically working is good enough in this day and age. Or, at the very least, it beats beating my head against a brick wall.
Hello,
do you have any idea when the firmware for Latin America will be released?
thanks all.
I’ve read all of the messages here but no one has mentioned the problem my wife has, therefore I have:
-
I use network shares, with categorized subdirectories.
-
When we finish watching a video she could then go into a directoriy with audio (e.g. MP3) and play that. With the new version it no longer shows audio files, only the M3U playlists. You can’t play music via playlist either. Directories with only audio files say “no media files”.
It’s a screaming pain for me to back all the way out of the server, go from Video to Music then drill back down into the music files. Unfortunately that process is too difficult for my wife so to her all of our music is gone, where she can’t get to it anyway. That part isn’t acceptable to us so I spent an hour trying to downgrade. Thankfully one guy mentioned that you have to edit the .VER file which the main instruction page did not.
Bill_S wrote:
R_Daneel wrote:
WOW right back atcha TonyPh12345…you’re COMPLETELY ignoring the contemptuous way WD is treating its long time customers as witnessed by their total lack of concern on this and other threads to make the products they SOLD actually WORK as advertised…THEY DON’T! THAT, IMHO, says ALL you need to KNOW about whether or not you should or should NOT do business with a company. FALSE advertising from my perspective and WD is NOT the only company who treats their customers in so scurvy a fashion…I can think of some very expensive laser printers that have become door stops because the manufacturer doesn’t feel like supplying Windows 7 drivers for their customers…make em BUY A NEW ONE!..Well a LOT of people DO buy NEW ONES…but the SMART ones DO NOT buy from the companies that SCREWED THEM!
As for Hard Drives being produced by only one or two companies?..another MYTH of capitalism shot down…eh boys and girls?..long live Monopolies…or so says the masochists in the world of consumerism.
R_Daneel
I’m sorry you feel this way, but if you were a long time customer, you would already know that we bend over backwards to help our customers. We may not be perfect, but we are not contemptuous of our customers. Nobody could be, and stay in business.
Moreover, your own illustration of the laser printer issue betrays you. Nobody smart buys a product for what they think it’s going to do in the future. They buy a product for what it does for them, now. Nobody really knows where future technology will go. So how can you get angry at a company for not supplying updated drivers when you bought the device for the operating system it was built for. And it worked for you. You assumed that the company owed it to you to make drivers for Windows 7. They didn’t.
We’ve all become accustomed to thinking that technology products will continue to be sustained after we buy them. Hopefully even made better. But that isn’t always feasible. Sustaining products is a big issue with many companies. It’s costly. But we’ve sustained this product for 3 years. Maybe not perfectly, but we’ve stuck with it longer than most companies could. How is that contemptuous?
Personally, I think anyone chasing new technology (myself included) has to be a masochist.
I’m confused. This is product is considered old at 3 years?
And then you say chasing new technology is masochistic. So what 20 minutes between those should we be buying after it’s stable but before it’s “old”?
And every time we upgrade a PC operating system we are expected to throw anyway our printers and scanners?
Do you pitch your TV every 3 years?
Do you pitch your receiver every 3 years? Your TiVo?
The “operating system a printer was built for”? That makes as much sense as repurchasing a book because you changed the spectacles the book was built for. We’re not talking hardware change like USB versus parallel we’re talking about the same old HPCL or Postscript bytes under XP, Vista and Win 7.
I started out unhappy with the dramatic/nasty comments against WD, but if the company’s philosophy is that we should be throwing away a key part of my home entertainment center every couple of years maybe I should be rethinking my provider. I’ve had my Pioneer receiver long after the VCR it was built for.
R_Daneel, thanks for the tips, and sorry it’s been so long for me to get back to you. Tried your steps, no dice. I still can’t see all of the shared content on my network shares. I can see the network shares, just not all the content on them. Unplugging the device and plugging it back in didn’t help. Making sure my “server” is the master browser didn’t help either. Maybe it’s time to go to one of the custom firmwares.
Sorry it didn’t work for you, at the end of the day it DIDN’T work for me either!..After roughly four to seven hours all the Network Shares vanished and no matter what I did I could not get them to return…so it was back to 1.06.16…but in truth that’s only a LITTLE better as it to suffers from occasional disappearing Network Shares but I have found some ways with that version to get them to return.
KennyBoy wrote:
I’ve read all of the messages here but no one has mentioned the problem my wife has, therefore I have:
- I use network shares, with categorized subdirectories.
- When we finish watching a video she could then go into a directoriy with audio (e.g. MP3) and play that. With the new version it no longer shows audio files, only the M3U playlists. You can’t play music via playlist either. Directories with only audio files say “no media files”.
It’s a screaming pain for me to back all the way out of the server, go from Video to Music then drill back down into the music files. Unfortunately that process is too difficult for my wife so to her all of our music is gone, where she can’t get to it anyway. That part isn’t acceptable to us so I spent an hour trying to downgrade. Thankfully one guy mentioned that you have to edit the .VER file which the main instruction page did not.
Hi,
I am having some trouble following what you say above, so excuse me if I “don’t get it” and set me straight. It sounds to me like the firmware/media player is operating correctly. By this I mean, to properly find Audio files, one has to be in the main category for “Music”, and fortunately the media player filters out any files in a folder that are not the proper type, i.e. video files in an audio folder will be filtered out. If one wants to find audio files they must go into “Music”, if they want to find Video files, they need to enter through the “Video” category on the WD main menu.
The fact that you found mp3 files to play when in the Video category is not the way the player should operate, and on occasion I have stumbled into this sort of problem when poking around in combined media folders on my PC. But, it is not the norm. ALL my music folders for the media player are just that – only contains music files. Same goes for my Video folders; all video files are found in video-containing folders. So, when I go into Videos I ONLY see Video folders with video files and can find ALL my videos, and same situation goes for Music.
The fact that you found some sort of “backdoor” to get around this organization and filtering was unusual, and perhaps the new firmware closed that door, whereas an older firmware did not.
My wife can find everything, because she knows to look for videos in the Video category, and music in the Music category, and last but not least, photos in the Photo category. Admittedly, she is a computer system admin, but this concept is not rocket science and not too difficult for anyone to grasp; especially if one’s media is well cataloged and arranged in folders properly.
The best way I found to organize is to attach hard drives to the media player with ALL the various media I want to play on it, arranged properly and not to hunt around in shared PC directories and folders looking for stuff.
Let me characterize it another way. I have 8tb (RAID5) of content all on one share, categorized. With that much data it takes some organization, therefore a few subdirectories to get to a show or album.
I get the idea that the main menu of the WDTV, looking at it from the top down seems more logical, but she is a user not a DBA. In the previous version you could just play media. From the bottom up, it didn’t matter if it was a TV show, a movie, a documentrary, an album or family pictures.
It was hard enough getting her to find her way to a share after a reboot, but backing all the way out to the top-most level of the system to drill back into the shares is too much.
The previous version was very user friendly this way, you could just browse to any content you wanted. The new version made it harder, taking way more button clicks and a structural view to navigate.
It’s not a “back door”, it’s just how it worked.
The last half of your second paragraph kind of supports what I’m saying. If you don’t want to see video & music & photo’s in the same directory when browsing under VIDEO then don’t mix them in the directory, thus the imposed filtering would be unneccessary.
I don’t see the advantage of making it more difficult (less friendly) to move between media types on the fly. The previous version just allowed the user to play anything and you could mix or segragate directory content at the users option. The new version imposes only one way of doing things. As a Sr. Analyst/Programmer I strive to design systems based on how the users may want to use the system. And different users find different ways more intuitive from each other. Restricting (closing doors) users from ease-of-use with no hazzard (like exiting without saving) seems more **bleep** than friendly.
Back in the day my multi-disc DVD/CD layer didn’t make me switch from video to audio mode before going from DVD to CD.
Bottom line: My wife could handle the way it did work but can’t handle the new version. Whether the device is too sophisticated or she is too unsophisticated the user looses joy. Systems are designed for the users experience not the programmers.
OK, here are solutions so you and my wife can cohabitate:
-
SETTINGS option to operate new or old way.
-
In addition to segragated menu options VIDEO, MUSIC, PHOTOS add COMBINED (or better term) to let the user browse freely without getting in & out of shares or drives (never tried media servers, that option just gets in the way for me). After a lot of “testing” I can assure you it works flawlessly!
Or just don’t mix media in directories if you don’t want media mixed.
[reductio ad absurdum, sorry] Maybe we should segragate further. Have top level MP3 versus FLAC versus OGG?
Sorry if I sound too defensive, I get that way defending my wife.
Maybe the simplest response is: The old way apparently made us both happy, the new way makes me unhappy. Going from no unhappy people to 1 is not progress.
