Pretty Upset

Community Archives WD TV Live Networking
1

OK-

Look, im not a perfectionist. I LOVE tinkering around with ALL things electronic. But this WDTV Live fiasco i think is a product that is NO WHERES near ready for mainstream. (as advertised anyway). Will it play a movie attached to it from an external HD? sure. but other than that, it is a 50/50 gamble if what you are about to try is going to work.

I have spent the last 9 hours (literally) to try and get my units to perform some pretty basic tasks. All to no avail. Or at least, not without some SERIOUS patience, coaxing and prayer vigils to the G-DS!!!

There have been NUMEROUS issues from MANY users regarding the transfer speeds through a network. 1.5MB-3MB transfer speeds is NOT ACCEPTABLE for a unit that is advertised with all of the bells and whistles under the sun. i bought 4 of these players for a networked home that these *supposedly* would have worked well with.

they are all being returned tomorow.

there is NO EXCUSE why these units should have transfer rates of ~1.5MB/sec. PERIOD. There is no excuse for that. not with todays technology and not with how this unit is advertised. There is NO EXCUSE why people should have to spend hours upon hours upon hours to try and learn how to make their units work as they are advertised. OK, maybe a tweak here or a tweak there is ok. But come on WD…the networking with these things is non-existent. the transfer cpacity of these units is worse than my 1999 Nokia telephone. (literally). I can transfer files faster via blue tooth in my car than i can through this WD player.

I tried the 3rd party software. did absolutely nothing. People are buying this product pretty much for above average technologically advanced audio/video setups. I would think that network capability to transfer files would be just about the most important aspect of a unit like this and yet you seem to ignore almost ALL of the complaints here.

Im sorry, i know people are going to flame back. i know moderators are gonna get all sorts of pissed off, but come on. there is no reason in the world to have THIS MANY SERIOUS problems with a product. people should not have to take a microsoft engineering course, and spend HOURS UPON HOURS on a forum and on line to try and read up on a product to perform as it is advertised.

If people (including myself) were complaining about the product not performing tasks it was not designed for, i would understnad (so would alot of other people). but the networking problems, adapter problems, transfer speed problems, disappearing problems in networks, 1 day it works 1 day it doesnt work problems are just TOO much!!!

It will one day, be a good product. but it has a LONG way to go.

Sorry to be so blunt. but i gave it a shot and was MUCH MORE patient with these units than i am with almost anything else that frustrates the hell outta me.

I suppose i’ll pop back every once in a while to see  the  replies to this message, but the bottom line is the product doesnt perform and operate as it is advertised to.

Sorry WD!! I tried! :frowning:

2

The only reply I can give is that you joined some weeks ago and have made 2 posts including this one. In the first post you seemed quite positive. You never came back and asked for any help with your problems.

I don’t thing that you have any worry regarding flaming etc as your post is actually very very mild in comparison with some disgruntled posters.

All the best.

3

Eh ? The samba shares have a 25-30 mbit rate (so 3-4 MB) which is enough to stream 99% of your files. In case you have extremely high bitrate files you could switch over to NFS (via homebrew), you’ll get around 75 mbit then, which is about the max you will get on ANY mediaplayer available, because they’re not supporting gbit yet. BTW, these results are the same on any player, because of the chipset limitations.

Sigma announced new chipsets with Gbit support but from what I’ve heard, transfer rates on these chips isn’t much higher than 12 MB/s. 

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Not sure what the purpose of your post is? I bought one unit first, installed it, and made sure it worked for my network and files, which is wired and mainly divx encoded files. Then I bought two more and all three units work perfectly. As another post said, you asked for no help so no telling what your situation is nor what it is that you are trying to do. However, buying four of them without knowing whether one was going to work for you seems insane. I agree that the packaging and marketing imply these networked players are plug and play; however, nothing except stuff from apple that forces you to use ALL their stuff and files only comes close to plug and play. If you are like many of us with different video files, photos and music, AND network devices from different makers, nothing you buy will be plug-n-play…  Al

1 Like
5

good lord, get a shrink

You wouldve been better off posting your issues and seeing if perhaps there is a resolution. whats ironic is, it is in fact due to todays technology why such devices can have such conflicts with all the apps and little things here and there

Your post was useless and most of all annoying, with the mr. know it all attitude and what we should have today quotes…

If it doesnt work because you are incompetent then so be it, but clearly it works for the rest of us who somehow were able to follow instructions and manage to keep our systems working properly. 

your issue seems to be USER ERROR. 

6

I have to agree with  ctlasers the WD Live does have some issues. I have had issues with it (can’t stream directly to it need to add an additional switch for it to stream properly) Gbit should have been the way to go on the device (considering other devices that do run on gbit with the sigma chip). I understand the limitations of Samba but to advertise a product to playback 1080p is a little dicey on a 10/100 Nic. ( i know many of you will say I can do it not the point)  You can’t assume everyone’s encoded files will play and you can’t always please everyone.

my 2cents

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Here is the thing. The WDTV live uses a hardware chip for playback . That chip conforms to standards.  99.9% of the files that do not play back properly are ones that do not conform to the standards. People should go read the developer notes on things like x264 codecs and look at all the workarounds the developers had to add , not because there was something wrong with the codec, but to accomodate people that mess with encoding settings and change them to things the codecs standard was not intended to do. If you are downloading videos and they do not play on the WDTV live then start with this program. It will show all the details , compare that with the standard for the codec. If they differ it is not the WDTV at fault because people used custom profiles. 

Mediainfo lite:

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/MediaInfo-Lite/1183386892/1

Standards Website:

The network issues are on the users end. I can max out my WDTV box at 11MB/sec . Blu-ray at the highest settings can only consume half of that so no reason it should stutter. Connect the box directly to the pc, no router, no switch, nothing but the pc ----network cable-----wdtv box

Try the transfer then. If the rate is high then you know it is the network.