So what do the thmers want or need from WD?

Full and proper documentations, or atleast full discloser of what can be done now… and without having to rely onthe great work Themers here had to discover.

I see no issue with what your saying.

Only limit on it would be when they couldn’t comment due to agreements with say the like of netflicks and the like.

But this is likely not going to have much if any impact on the themeing.

I have to agree with Joey, I am not a Themer, but a user, when researching what I was going to buy, I did my homework, it was the Themers brilliant work that sold me the WD products, I know they must put lots of hours in to perfect the work and I wont name all the Themers but I think we all know who I am talking about, please WD listen to the people who help sell your products, respect the work they do, we as end users do. To all themers, keep up the good work we all appreciate your efforts.

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ya you are absolutely right Daveart. Cool themes made me to buy wd live smp . 

+1

I missed a lot of things but I’ll say like Joey.

I really miss the creativity Dev, Joey, Tinwarble, Medic and so on brought to the unit. It was a barebone display that became spectacular with their graphic capabilities. So yes, they [WD] should have been more open on the subject and have more conversations on what could be done and what could not. The joy/love/praise some themers would have gained if some of their themes was available to download from the Hub…

And frankly, I don’t want to be the bad guy or anything, but everyone that says that bought the WD for theming? Really? Until Tinwarble* started the trend in 2010-11, it wasn’t even an issue. There was a lot of more comparable priced unit that had theming support from the start (xtreamer in exemple) but the Live Hub was never one of them.

*** edited for correct information.

thegreaterikku wrote:

And frankly, I don’t want to be the bad guy or anything, but everyone that says that bought the WD for theming? Really? Until Joey started the trend in 2010-11, it wasn’t even an issue. There was a lot of more comparable priced unit that had theming support from the start (xtreamer in exemple) but the Live Hub was never one of them.

Really, so Joey started the trend before he joined the community on 1-05-2011.

The fact is that the first person who started theming was PsychoTHC, followed by myself and juliojs, Extremedigital, Firetix, zballz, Hell3bound

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I know, I know but, unless I am mistaken and please correct me if I am, it wasn’t until he first showed his work that theming became something else than just reworking the basic theme WD had (all of them which are still working like a charm with the latest FW) and started this whole “don’t upgrade to X version else it won’t work” debate which ultimately lead to now.

I didn’t have a Hub from the start and only looked around the forum a bit (so I might have overlooked something) and I really don’t want to say that everyone before him was irrelevent (too much respect for your work for that).

Nope, you’re wrong.

In all actuality major changes had been started well before Joey had started themeing.

This is when major changes were started to be played with:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/Mini-Theming/td-p/138902/highlight/true

This is Joeys first theme:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/My-1st-Live-Hub-Theme-Project/td-p/151136

Take notice of post dates.

Apologies then. It really looked like an upgraded basic theme so I didn’t count it.

I’ve edited the post to reflect the change.

Clearly we need a more clear set of instructions on how to theme and whats possiable from wd.

Nothing unreasonsable about that and some help from the coders to do as long as it doesn’t take away from the rest of the work also seems resoanble.

It only makes sense for wd to do so and perfect timing to do so with boxee angering it buyers in such a massively stupid way.

I do like your positive thinking. But…

I doubt either is going to happen, it’s pretty obvious that WD do not want to get sucked into themes, hence the site change and all the other stuff we have read.

And have you not seen the size of some of these threads on themes, how deep does a Themer go, how much time does it take, and can you write a lot of it down in a manual, maybe the basics of what PNG = what screen, but all the XML code, don’t think so.

Clearly it would have to be the basics and then its likely any think you do because you enjoy it…hard work.

Postive thinking maybe but more iam just very stuborn and a tad driven.

As of this moment iam typing with two splints on my wrist due to damaged cartlige/broken wrist from a fall.

The same fall also ruptured a disk in my neck which has caused me to loose much of the feeling in control up to my elbows.

Massively frustrating but the surgry to fix it is easy enough and very high sucess rate.

This is of course on top of being diagnosed with hemochromatosis in july.

Life isn’t alwasy far so you can whine about it or put your head down and keep moving forward.

Also wd ha suspported thier products and lived up to what they clamied during sale so i doubt they going to toss a chance to improve the product for free.

Word of mouth affects how stuff sells and these days wd one of the top three.

This market is growing more and more now so why wouldn’t wd not want to give alittle help to those improving thier product for free.

Now you know why my spelling is so bad…lol :slight_smile:

WD did provide at one stage, provide a “Basic” Theme Manual for Download.

They “Pulled” the Download link quite a while ago.  Back then, i wondered … Why ?  

But, you can read it here, if you still want …

http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Hub-Themes/WDTVLiveHub-ThemeDefinition-v1-0-Here/td-p/373315

The answer why the documentation and even the complete section …/themes on the WD product page is not there anymore can only be that theming should not be promoted and pushed in marketing from WD.

I think with just that poor document (in version 1.0) it is impossible  to be able to create amazing themes …

But you themers did it !!

I am sure WD was and is really suprised of the fantastic results of the themes (compared to the original one).

It is a surprise for them what happened.

But they are not just proud of it … there is also some kind of fear.

Because really great themes are …

… showing how simple and boring the original one is

… very hard to give suppport to (impossible if the themer goes away)

… dangerous if there are copyright issues in the themes

to answer the original question…

do we expect that they follow our lead? Of course not

do we expect that they make theming a priority? No of course not

but I would expect an open dialogue

so many questions why things have been taken away, so many questions about png, about thumbnail cropping, compression, memory issues, movie sheet trigger…

give us a heads up like… “hey listen we have renamed the page of the player… we will release in 2 days… be prepared”

Instead we find out the hard way, and it turns out nobody even knew it was renamed. Basic functions such as “skip time” got lost for several video files, external hard drive recognition took a hit, navigation got slower and on top of that functions been added that among round about 80 suggestions have never been suggested. This causes massive head scratching not only because nobody i know can follow this logic.

Support theming or not… in an open dialogue we could elaborate a few things that have been repeatedly posted in our theme posts. I have learned alot about your likes and dislikes in my theme threads, i started to understand how you think and there have been a lot of patterns which I see ignored. We could have shared this knowledge and in my opinion it can never hurt to know what your customers want, because even if you don’t want to feature it there is another line you don’t want to cross in breaking it.

In all fairness, Bill tried with a particular issue, unfortunately i got sick during that time and the issue was solved by community effort. I wanted to mention that because I want to excempt Bill from the critique above.

Now we have atleast a starting point where we can hopefully get them to change thier methods .

More comunacation would make things easier for all.

I havent been on here for sometime, and sold my WD hub about 6-7 months ago and vowed never to buy a WD product again.  why? because they dont listen, and dont care. 

I have had everyone of there products. every single one was plagued with bad firmwares. full of bugs. it got to the point where you had to decided what you wanted to work, and what you didnt. for themers the .png support. or the fact it worked for a short peroid was good for themers, well i certainly liked the look. and some of the themes that joeysmyth produced using this method i would consider to be the best looking. yet this was pulled on the 3.x firmwares.

now WD explained that this was no longer supported. The way i saw it, they broken it and couldnt work out how to fix it. 

To me the fact you could theme this device is what sold it to me. it you dont care about the themes, then do not give the option or ability to able to theme it… simple.

Also a kind request. please do not keep sending me emails to beta test anything. as far as im concerned everything is still in beta. the idea of beta, is to have it tested and fix what ever bugs arise. NOT supply another firmware with even more bugs, and services i dont want and care about. 

so my conclusion. if you want something that works dont buy WD.  My intake of headaches tablets have reduced considerably since leaving them.

Not very helpful to post that in a help there now was it.

Iam not sure what you problems with the box where but i dealt with a copmany that really didn’tr care which is boxee.

As of today they killed support offical for the box althought it really stopped in jan.

The wd does what it promises and issues do get fixed which is something boxee never did.

Maybe not as quick as we like or with enough info on whats going on but it does happen .

Some people seem to have this expectation of perfection from a device and that is never going to truely happen.

What they should want and expect is a device that deleivers on its promises and keeps supporting the device.

Boxee failed on all these fronts but wd hasn’t.

A perfect example of somethign truely bad is media scanning.

On the wd it takes 20 min and the box uses my metadata.

On the boxee it takes 20 plus hours and metadata is a aftethought at best.

@magnus33

The issue is that the Themers here feel that they are not getting the support that they would like to be able to code to to a standard that they can expect will be consistant with the new FW releases. I am not a coder and agree with many of your statements, I am just not sure that they are what this post is refering to. If you bought the Live Hub to because of the themes or the ability to write themes, you may rightly so be unhappy with what has transpired so far.

On your note, I too am very pleased with the product. I did not (and would not) buy this or any other product for the theming  aspect. I had Hundeds of movies, Thousands of CDs and several hundred concert videos. I was looking for something that would play my media from some sort of menu system, be able to access media on remote machines (servers, USB drives and NAS), and for me, having all my music in FLAC, that became the most important feature to me. I originaly bought a live plus and to be honest, was and still am very happy with it., using it in the bedroom now that I have a HUB in the TV room.  It is an extremley basic menu system, but plays my media which is what I bought the box for. Therefore, i am very content with the product. The fact that some amazing people here wrote themes that I use has only enhanced my experience, and I am truly grateful for that. That being said, if I was stuck with the stock theme, I’d be content, as I simply want to find a movie or a CD and play it without flipping discs. So yes, if you bought the HUB to play your media, it works great, and I get a bunch of other online features (Youtube, TuneIn, Spotify, HULU) that I use every day. Bottom line, works great for those of us that wanted those features. I got what I bought it for, and have very little to complain about.

Now, if the main reason you bought the HUB was because of the ability to have cool themes or to code them yourself, you may be pretty frustrated, and rightly so. As the FW has progressed, the ability to do these things has diminished, or at least beome much harder. I fault no themer here for being frustrated or deciding to stop upgrading their themes. I would expet that they would like to spend their time coding better and cooler themes, not trying to retrofit what they have already made so it will work with each new FW realease.

Bottome Line:

So, let not confuse the issue of this thread. You area happy, or at least content with the support and features that you are recieving (as am I), but that is not what a thread entitled " Re: So what do the thmers want or need from WD?" is really about. It is about the issues surrounding wriing themes and the lack of support these people are getting as third parties trying to help out the community, and doing it in their free time, for little reward. I am absolutley in love with the theme I am currently using, it’s a piece of art, and i am awe of the coder that wrote it. I will be truly bummed when I get to a FW rev that makes it so I can no longer use this theme. Will it stop me from using the HUB? Nope, I need a menu system and reasonable search function that will allow me to find and play the media I am looking for. I bought it for that and intend to use it to that capacity.

I thank all of you who have dedicated so much time making our HUBs look better. As above, it’s not why I bought the device, but you have certainly enhanced my overall experience with it. 

-P  

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