Pre-Purchase Questions - WDTV LIve Streaming

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

After reading most of the posts related to this player, I still have some unanswered questions:

  1. Is the player able to display PGS subtitles from a HD MKV container?

  2. Is the player able to play Blu-ray ISOs from a SMB or NFS network share over a wired network with no issues?

Thanks

2

CMarinsr wrote:

After reading most of the posts related to this player, I still have some unanswered questions:

 

  1. Is the player able to display PGS subtitles from a HD MKV container?
  1. Is the player able to play Blu-ray ISOs from a SMB or NFS network share over a wired network with no issues?

 

Thanks

 

 

I can’t unswer number 2, but the answer to number 1 is a big yes.

I have played back a straight HD 1080p/24 rip of the Blu-ray Disc The Godfather Part 2 (ripped using MakeMKV) and the subs show up fine.

Steve W

3

Thanks Steve. I’ll wait for an answer to my second question before making a decision as my TV Shows are MKV and my movies are BD ISO.

4

WDTV plays my MKV files fine from a hard disk connected to the media player.  Playing (streaming)  though a wired network is problematic, depending upon the complexity of the MKV file (it seems the higher the quality of the source video, the less likely to play without problems; e.g. jitter and/or bad sound).  Bottom line: play via hard drive connected to WDTV.

Regular DVD ISO files work well no matter how I play them, but blu-ray ISO files don’t play at all, or if they do, they might not play by starting from the beginning, and there is no menu support, as blu-ray menus are a java app, and the WDTV does not do java I have been told.

The program I use to create MKV files from my blu-rays is PavTube’s ByteCopy.  See this link about the attributes of ByteCopy from Anime_fan in this message thread:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-General-Discussions/How-To-Convert-a-BluRay-to-MKV-With-SUBTITLES-INCLUDED/td-p/175260

5

Thanks Mike but I don’t think that with the right implementation streaming BD ISO over the network should be a problem. I have a Hub and a Dune in my setup and the Dune works beautifully over my MOCA network (>9 MB/s for SMB and >10 MB/s for NFS). The Hub chokes at around 20-22 Mb/s ( < 3 MB/s) but works fine when streaming from a DLNA server. I know that most DLNA servers don’t stream ISO files but Wild Media Server exposes playlists and m2ts files from a BD ISO, so I’m fine. At this point I think I’ll stick with the Hub (as reports on the new device’s performance are not encouraging for both SMB and NFS) and wait for Dune to bring the new generation of streamers on the market, next year.