A question to users about v 1.05.04_B for the Live Plus player
(I believe the old Live has a similar firmware; same numbers and ends in a V instead of B. Someone correct me if I am wrong about the Live firmware version released same time as this Plus firmware was in May, 2011)
OK, back to v 1.05.04_B:
This is the most bug-free version of the firmware, and I want to know if anyone can tell us if they:
- Rolled back from the disasterous firmwares of the past few months, to the “safe” firmware, v1.06.16_B (or V)
-
And, then rolled safely back from it, to version 1.05.04. (Live and Live Plus users please answer.)
Any problems? Working great? Other issues?
Question for WD: WHEN are we going to get a decent and bug-free firmware update for these units? It has been quite some time since the last buggy attempts. Have you given up on us users?
The highest revision I’ve taken my rev-00 Live is 1.06.15V, which I had up-rev’ed and back-rev’ed twice. The rev-01 Live I bought a little while back was first brought back to 1.06.15V and then to 1.05.04V without a hitch. In all cases, I used the same 1.05.04V_rollback zip image (from the WD downloads site) that I expanded out onto a USB stick. I kept a copy of the original zip in case it became unavailable for any reason.
1.05.04V has been pretty good, although I’ve noticed that Flingo has stopped working in the last month or two. Although I don’t use it that often, I miss some of the channels (TED for instance). Neither of my Live boxes can start it properly, as it just sits there forever with the “initializing” progress bar displayed but not sweeping across like it used to. I suspect Flingo changed something in their website access, but I haven’t bothered to pursue.
I still have strong suspicions that the Live is not playing 24Hz variable framerate properly, even at 1.05.04V. The fact that I can make the strobe-like jitter clear up after a few toggles of the pause button suggests to me that it’s not caused by the way the file is coded. Wild guess, maybe the Live is erroneously interpreting the varable framerate flag in the file and consequently applying de-telecine as if the source material was 60Hz interlaced. I may go as far as checking for this using a really old load (like 1.02.21) on one of my boxes. If the same 24Hz VFR files play correctly with that ancient load, it’s pretty clear WD broke something somewhere after that.
So why use variable framerate in the first place? So far, pretty much all files I’ve seen have varibale bitrate but constant framerate.
