I’m using a WD TV Live Plus and generally it is just working and for $100 dollars I am so far very impressed with the user interface and how it actually works.
I am however having a problem with listening to music via a DLNA server with the output using digital or Stereo via HDMI into a Denon 4806CI receiever.
My DLNA server streams WAV ( I want lossless and bit perfect) and between tracks there is always a burst of static for about 1 second.
When streaming directly to the Denon via the same DLNA server there is no static.
It is almost as if the buffer is not being flushed between tracks and that is what I hear.
Anyone else seeing this issue?
This is a 5 day old WD TV Live Plus upgraded to 1.04.10_B firmware
Edit/
After finally getting CIFS shares to work with my Win 2K8 R2 server (enable browser service) I also tested the same WAV files via the share and still get static.
As my WAV files all include a RIFF INFO chunk that contains all my tagging information - I wonder if this is what I am actually hearing. Until now everything I play the WAV files is just fine including the Denon receiver, however maybe the WDTV is not correctly ignoring teh INFO chunk??
Will try a few non tagged WAV files and see what happens
Hopefully you mean RIFF INFO is not supported. The standard WAV format is RIFF.
A player that doesn’t support RIFF INFO should just ignore it and not actually try and play it.
This is also the same method that Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) is compatible with anything that support WAV as the metadata information is ignored and skipped over.
Will remove the RIFF INFO from a couple of files later and verify this is the case.
Took me a while to get some time to play a little more with this and the problem is how the WD TV supports the RIFF header. The specification defines the RIFF header and part of that is the “Size of data chunk” which is a DWORD (4 bytes) which defines the size of the data chunk. Using a hex editor and a small 30 second .wav file, I can map out the headers and correctly find the offset to the end of the data chunk (i.e. the music) . The next chunk is ID3 which contains my tags. the WD TV is still treating this as part of the data chunk.
I doubt this will ever get fixed as I know I’m in the minority using WAV with tags, but, I’m not looking for tag support, other might, but I stream my wave via DLNA, I just want the WD TV to obey the RIFF specification and only “play” the data chunk and ignore any other chunks.
Either way, a heads up for anyone else that happens to hear static at either the start or the end of a .wav file.
This is the problem, doesn’t matter if it is streamed, SMB share, USB or whatever.
Interesting stuff … I was thinking of getting this device and definitely want only LPCM uncompressed audio.
I wrote a little C# utility a while back to strip all subchunks out of a RIFF wav file (I think it also works with multichannel) and output just the raw 44 byte header version (required for some other apps):
Thanks for the info regarding the removal of the INFO chunks, but I’m staying with the headers and the other players either ignore it or I can keep my tags in place for the library management.
I just built another DLNA server instance that streams MP3. (thinking about it I may try FLAC later)
At some point they may update the library that decodes WAV and fix this, as I’m finding more and more items hitting the market with BWF or WAV with tag support.
As for your other question, so far I’ve only managed to get 44.1 and 48KHz to work. Any 96KHz just didn’t play, but tehn I didn’t try real hard. If I get some time I’ll try again and see what success I get and update the post.
