Please add USB DVD drive support

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Are there any news on this. Why is the WD TV Live + still missing it…?

My old LG home theater’s DVD lens seems to be failing, but I love the rest of the setup. Don’t really want to buy a new system now. I wish I could just plug an external DVD drive to the WD TV Live + and be able to play my huge DVD children collection for my kids :S

2

wdlxtv http://forum.wdlxtv.com/index.php provides USB DVD support for the WDTV Live box. In my region, Australia, the practicality is that I can purchase a new stand alone DVD player with the proper DVD menu control functions cheaper than a computer USB DVD player. The other issue you have to deal with is power supply requirements. Will the WDTV Live box deliver the power supply requirements to power an external DVD player? I doubt it.

3

But the primary reason it won’t happen (at least I doubt) is because most people have their DVD collection ripped to HD storage, and this device was designed for exactly that scenario in mind.   

4

Ok, keep in mind that this is a guess…

If I share a DVD drive from my PC to the WDTV Live and play a store-bought DVD that does not have CSS protection (I own a couple that came that way from the manufacturer :dizzy_face:), the WDTV plays it fine.

If I play a store-bought DVD that does have CSS protection, then it doesn’t play.

So, obviously the WDTV doesn’t De-CSS the .vob streams.

My guess is that it’s a licencing issue.  When you bought the player, you didn’t pay any CSS licencing fees, so WD would never be able to add CSS-decryption playback to the player.

And since WD would be unable to add unlicenced CSS decryption, then even if they did add support for USB DVD players, your player presumably wouldn’t be able to play any store-bought DVD’s.  Which makes adding support for DVD players seem somewhat pointless, ya know?

If you’d have to decrypt the disc anyway to be able to play it, it’s faster and less clutter, to decrypt it to a hard drive, than it is to burn it to a DVD.

The whole reason I bought my WDTV, was to NOT have stacks of discs everywhere, and have to dig through them and find the one I want.  I bought it so I didn’t have to play DVDs anymore.

1 Like