Hi folks, ive been reading posts here for the last month, I just registered, and this is my 1st post.
A little background on me… I’m 46 years old and I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. Since 1993, I have owned a company that specializes in advanced home theater and commercial A/V systems. We also do a lot of work with networking, voice communication and IT. From day one to this very day, I work in the field every day, not behind a desk, and I have worked with electronic products from Bose to Zenith and everything in between. I am considered a highly technical and advanced user of complex electronics.
In my own home, I am known for having some of the coolest electronic toys and state-of-the-art electronics available, as well as the same everyday CE stuff that everyone else has. I installed an RF distribution system in my home many years ago that was still in use until recently when I decided it was time to stop piping the movies from an external HDD, connected to my living room Blu-ray player throughout the house in analog 480i RF.
I did my homework looking for a reasonable media server system that could simply hold all my movies in a central location, be accessed and maintained via PC, and stream my movies to 3 TV’s. All my TV’s are Toshiba smart TV’s, which in my professional opinion, have the best 240hz LED technology out there, but the built-in media players just flat-out [Deleted].
Anyway, after careful consideration of features and user-friendly GUI for the far less tech savvy individuals in my house (my wife), Nothing I found was exactly what I wanted, but the closest thing (on paper) turned out to be the WD system.
So, About 1 month ago, I spent a small fortune on the 2TB N900 Central router, the WD Range extender, 2 WD-TV “Play” units and 1 WD-TV “Live“ unit for my main home theater system. It was certainly reasonable to assume that WD’s boasting of their current range of products working together so well would be true.
For the most part, everything does work pretty well, besides the N900 being an unbelievably sensitive device that doesn’t react well to interaction at all. God forbid I copy an MKV file from my PC to the internal drive (via Ethernet), the wireless crashes? And of course if I’m downloading some huge file on the PC, nobody can watch anything on any of the players OR have decent wifi speed on our iPhones. Since I assigned static IP’s to everything in the system, I don’t have much aggravation from the “Play” units anymore, so I don’t have anything more to say about them, except that the low-res GUI is lame, and its very hard to read tiny white text on huge neon pink tiles since the designers apparently felt it was more user-informative to reserve 80% of the tile image to accomidate the gigantic icon of a folder!
My point? All that rambling is leading up to my rant about this [Deleted], WD-TV “Live” device, that has earned the honor of being the first ever electronic device in my home to be given a nickname… “The Electronic [Deleted]”.
The primary problem is the design by where there is multiple ways to access the same [Deleted] information from the same source, which is something (thank god) they did NOT utilize in the “Play” unit. This “feature” is redundant, useless and just plain [Deleted]!!
To create user-friendly functionality with these units, the “favorites” feature is infinitely critical, but you cannot favorite anything unless it’s in your “media library” which is the MOST unstable “source” in the system, I can always get to my files in from the “media server” source, but I can’t use the dashboard or favorites in this mode… WHY??!
WHY can’t we favorite any file/folder from ANY “source”?
WHY can’t we use the dashboard with ANY “source”?
WHY can’t this thing load xml’s and metathumbs when I access THE SAME FILE from the “media server” source?
WHY can’t I use simple mkv chapter jump on the “Live” when I can on the “Play”?
Lastly, WHEN is WD going to decide to write a firmware that will simplify this [Deleted] and allow it operate reliably and efficiently?!?!??!!
On the rare occasion when “The Electronic [Deleted]” is not saying “There is no media in this folder” and lets us watch anything other than a yellow spinning arrow, the entertainment experience can best be described as a screenshot slideshow with a 40 second delay between slides, mixed with an occasional 4x scan burst through 2 minutes before the next screenshot.
This device has removed ALL possibility of spontaneous movie watching in my home, every time we want to watch a movie, it takes 1 “the previous device has been removed” error, 2 “unit restarts” at least 1 rescan of the entire media library before I can use the dashboard, and THEN 15-20 minutes of “there is no media in this folder” BS before I am allowed to access my “media library” files and POSSIBLY stream a movie… seamlessly.
So, in the end, I spend more time on my sofa pissed off than I do happily watching my movies, and my wife has been totally deprived of her movie collection because she hates “The Electronic A_hole” so much, she won’t even attempt to use it anymore.
Western Digital should be ashamed of themselves for even selling such an unstable, unreliable device to the general dipchit public, even the most experienced and tech savvy people can’t get this thing to function with any degree of stability that could be remotely defined or considered acceptable. It’s painfully obvious that none of the Dev’s at WD use any of these products in their own homes, or even beta test in a “pseudo-realistic” environment, because if they did, I would have a product that functions as designed and intended!! Oh, and one last thing, there is NO WAY in [deleted] I would ever recommend any of these devices to any of my customers, well, unless I hated them! lol
Closing plead… Dear WD, keep it simple [Deleted], lose the low-res, lame GUI in the “Play” unit and replace it with the GUI from the “Live” unit AND add ONLY the xml & metathumb features from the “Live”.
OR build what I just described as a full rewrite to the “Live” firmware… adding of course, MKV CHAPTER SKIP!!!
Seriously WD, how proud can you be, that your consumer products are being given nicknames like “The Electronic [Deleted]”?? In the digital and information age, its more critical than ever that you’re products dont [Deleted], otherwise the whole world will be alerted to it, so after 3 years, finally get your “stuff” together and get this WD-TV “Live” product working!!
Sorry to be so long winded, but I hope you at least enjoyed reading this, and perhaps feel better that you are not alone in your contempt for the [Deleted] WD-TV “Live”!
Steve
