Here is the rundown as best as I can put it … because I have already packaged and put in for return the (4) units that I purchased after attempting each firmware from the original on up and went through replacements already from Amazon which did the exact same thing …
I previously had two other units in the house, a Viewsonic VMP70 (bare minimum) and a decent Patriot Media Box Office (bare bones as well). Each one of these played (any) of my .MPEG, MKV, MT2S files without any problem whatsoever.
Upon hooking up the WD Live Streaming I immediately updated the firmware and it looked beautiful. Keep in mind that I’m doing this on 2 TV’s at my house and 2 at another (they were using Viewsonic VMP70’s for over a year)… I went and hit the play button on a random movie … worked great and started playing. Then I hit the stop button and went back to the movie list and selected another movie to play, say a MKV one. Played fine. Hit the stop button and went to play another MPEG movie (all of these are multi-channel) and then uh-oh. No Audio. The video keeps playing for about 20 seconds and then it goes black. The WD 2.0TB external drive connected to the player is no longer flashing either or responding.
I hit the (Home) button or (Back) button, which take me out of the movie. Now here is the worst part. Anytime I try to select a totally different movie; be it a MKV or MPEG or anything it says that the format of the movie is not supported and I need to check the manual for reference.
At first I thought this was a simple hardware glitch and I just got very unlucky because I’ve played all of these movies on devices made years ago and they all work fine. What shocked me is that this same problem occurs on every single WD TV Live Streaming that I purchased. EACH ONE. Sometimes I get lucky and they will play 3 or 4 random movies when I’m using the ( >>| ) command, etc. but sooner or later it happens again and requires a full reset.
Believe me, I’ve tried two different WD 2.0TB External drives and a Samsung 2.0TB drive just to make sure and used a total of (5) different WD Live Streaming. I even backed all the way down to the original firmware just to see what would happen and it still did the exact same thing.
To answer some of your technical questions, I had all of these devices hooked up to HDMI to a variety of different TV’s in two different households. No I didn’t use Composite because alot of these TV’s are mounted on the wall and I don’t have those cables running to them. I tried turning off and on the media library, internet, remote, with no luck either. I did notice that when this problem occurs that the audio says [Unknown] when you are in the preview page, when it showed up just fine a few minutes prior. Others on the forums had mentioned rolling the firmware back, way back, would solve the problem with the mult-channel MPEG files locking up, but I can tell you after doing TONS of testing with your devices that this does not work. Period.
The moment that I re-hook up the Patriot Media Box Office to the HDD, I can play each one of the movies back to back and skip to my hearts content between them without a single error or even a slight audio glitch. Believe me, I make sure that when I package the movies they play without error or I start all over again. I’m sorry that this has happened because I wanted to change out all of my units, plus my families units, which would have totalled around 9+ after it was all said and done, but after this I absolutely could not go further.
