Regular occurrences of unresponsiveness

Has this happened to anyone else? We use the thing just about everyday and with each use, our session, nearly always, is cut short by an unresponsive lock out.

This sort of behavior has happened since we’ve owned the thing (as I’m sure most other owners know) but it has gotten almost unusable for us.

The last firmware was great for about a week or so. Does WD purposefully code the firmware to die after a certain point?

Hi there,

You didn’t say exactly what you were doing when this occurs, are you watching a movie or perhaps one of the online services?

I have suffered similar symptoms on a regular basis but mostly after viewing YouTube or if I try to use the unit before the content update has finished scanning my media library. I don’t think the WD TV Live can multi task which is most likely down to memory issues of some sort.

I have exactly the same problem.  I was listening to a movie, then pressed Stop to return to my movie list, and nothing appeared.  I waited for more than 3 minutes and the WD Live TV was still searching for the videos on my shared PC.  I clicked “Back” and tried to look for Music and photos : same problem.

What is happening ?  I have ths product for only 1 week and I am not satisfied because it is often bugged.

christian1 wrote:
Has this happened to anyone else? We use the thing just about everyday and with each use, our session, nearly always, is cut short by an unresponsive lock out.

This sort of behavior has happened since we’ve owned the thing (as I’m sure most other owners know) but it has gotten almost unusable for us.

The last firmware was great for about a week or so. Does WD purposefully code the firmware to die after a certain point?

Interesting to hear.  I started encountering similar issues with one of my two SMPs and have rolled back the firmware.  So far, the problem seems to have disappeared.  As you note, I had no problems with the latest firmware for several weeks, but then started having instances where it just wouldn’t respond for many seconds, but then would execute all the button presses I had made.  SInce this has occurred on the SMP that we use for Netflix and not our second unit, I suspect it has something to do with Netflix usage.  It got so if I went into the Video/Media Library, it could take 10-15 secs to scroll ahead one page and have the icons get redrawn.  Rebooting unit always fixed it.  However, second unit that we rarely run Netflix on has continued to work fine for video streaming.  Very weird.  So my suggestion is if you are on the latest 2.01.86 firmware, try rolling back to firmware 1.16.13.

There’s only a few things we do with it, here is the feature we use and the guessed percentage chance you have of it locking up:

YouTube, 95% chance

Netflix, 70% chance

TuneIn Radio, 20% chance

Watch movie collection, 20% chance

Vimeo, 10% chance

What I noticed about firmware 2.01.86 is that after pressing STOP the screen turns black but instead to go back to the filebrowser, it will show 1-2 seconds of the last video and only then return to the filebrowser (seems to be a progression of a priveous back where returning to the file browser would play audio for 1-3 seconds). No unresponsiveness so far though.

What I see is this:

(1) Use Netflix for a couple of hours, working fine.

(2) Switch to Videos w/Media Library, starts OK, if a bit slow to draw movie iicons.

(3) Try to use NextPage button on remote to scroll to next page of movies, nothing happens, hit button again, still nothing, hit it again, then eventually a few pages will suddenly scroll, takes “forever” (10+secs) to display movie icons for page.

(4) Continued poor/slow performance with ML, essentially unusable.

(5) Switching back to Netflix has it still working fine however!

It performs very much like there is a runaway (100% cpu) process with video library.

What is so weird about this is that I updated the firmware on both of our two SMPs back in December and was absolutely positively not having any such behavior for the first few weeks, and am still not seeing such behavior on one of our SMPs.