Hi folks, recent videos that use the HEVC x265 codec won’t play on my WDTV Live Streaming Media Player. I’m guessing that’s because we’re no longer receiving firmware updates incorporating the latest codecs. I’m wondering what the best workaround would be.
The best ‘workaround’ is to buy a Media Player that supports it.
WDTV Media Players use Hardware Decoders for Video Playback … HEVC is not supported on the Sigma SOC’s that are in WDTV’s
HEVC requires lots of processing power … at least a Quad Core, all WDTV’s all Single Core processors.
eg. Raspberry Pi 3 Quad Core @ 1.2GHz 1GB RAM can Software Decode playback of HEVC with the Latest LibreELEC builds perfectly up to 1080p
WDTV by comparison is a Single Core @ 700 MHz 512MB RAM
The only workaround to playback your downloaded HEVC files on a WDTV’s is to re-encode HEVC(H.265) to AVC(H.264) for playback on WDTV.
Or, if you’re using a Media Server that trancodes “On the Fly” then playback may be possible … (transcoding H.265 to H.264) but also may be choppy as hell … you’ll need a Fast PC processor to try it.
Thanks for your prompt reply @JoeySmyth,
I guess that’s progress for you, although I do love my WDTV player - it just works (most of the time).
Thanks also for the head’s up on the Raspberry Pi, an interesting alternative and relatively inexpensive, at the cost of getting one’s hands dirty in LibreELEC. I did try going down the transcoding path, although it’s way too slow and storage hungry. I also cheekily tried to cast the HEVC video to my Chromecast, but not being the newer Ultra model, it plays the audio without the video…
Anyway, that’s for the advice.
it’s pretty easy to keep your hands clean when installing LibreELEC 
Just download LibreELEC for RPi2/3, extract it using 7zip, use Win32 Disk Imager to write it to a Micro SD Card then pop it in the Raspberry Pi and your done. Then enjoy watching HEVC video 
