Hey, not sure if you ever fixed this problem, but figured I’d post here to hopefully help a few other people.
It’s true that mp4’s just don’t seem to behave well with these harddrives, every single HD mp4 i’ve ever tried has had some slight skipping, the video completely freezes a few mins in and you can’t seem to fast forward without the file restarting from the beginning.
If you have all these issues, the way I get around it is converting the mp4 to mkv, then remuxing the mkv file (if needed) with the files below. (This process only takes a few mins at most, sometimes seconds depending on file size).
Firstly, check out post 4 of this thread:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-Elements-Play/MKV-issues-header-compression-already-removed/td-p/190120
You’ll wanna grab the 2 files that were linked (MKVFix and MKVToolNix v4.3.0).
Step 1.
Once you install both, go to where you installed MKVtoolnix.
-Run mmg.exe
-Click ‘Add’, then find the mp4 file that is giving you issues. After it’s added, you’ll see under Output filename it should rename it to an .mkv file. Click ‘Browse’ to choose where you wanna save it.
-Click ‘Start Muxing’
Step 2.
After that is done, run the program MKVFix.exe.
-First thing you wanna do is click ‘FindMKVToolNix’, then locate mkvinfo.exe wherever you installed MKVtoolnix.
-Then click ‘Run Search’ and point it to the folder where the .mkv file that you converted from Step 1 is.
- If it isn’t highlighted RED, it should work fine as is. If it is highlighted RED, select ‘Header Compression Only’ down the bottom and then click ‘Clean Files’
If you have alot of files to convert, it’s best to put them all in the same folder, so you can fix every file at once instead of doing it one by one.
After that is done, you’re newly converted mp4>mkv file should play perfectly now!
It’s a little more work but I don’t see WD ever fixing this considering there hasn’t been a firmware update for like over 2 years or so. TV shows etc are moving towards x264 codex with mp4 container now, so this fix works great for that too.
Hope this helps someone XD