I just got my WDTV Live and have been ripping a bunch of my movies to mp4 h.264 at a bitrate of 1500kbps. When I play them I am getting frequent “back outs” where the screen goes black and then acts like it is finding the WD TV Live as a new input (TV’s onscreen display shows input # and screen resolution). The movie then plays normal till the next black out. I also have a few old .mp4’s I ripped for my iPhone at ~500kbps that play fine. So my question is, is this bitrate too high to play through my attached usb 2.0 hard drive?
“…to mp4 h.264 at a bitrate of 1500kbps…”
that is not high at all. i have movies that are encoded at >9,000kbps and they play fine.
since youre encoding your own mp4s and have these blackouts when playing them
get an mp4 file from somewhere to test if it plays without any problems…if no blackouts occur then maybe its your encoding settings etc…
I’m not sure the bitrate is the problem. I tried a lower bitrate (~600kbps) TV episode and it did the same thing as well. So now I need to look into what else would cuase this, the more I look at it the more it looks like the WD TV Live’s signal to the TV drops out briefly. I’m currently using the included cables so maybe going to HDMI will resolve the issue.
Try using the composite cable and see if the signal drops out.
I have only recently purchased and connected my WDTV Live. I use it on a wired gigabit network and noticed that the PC network connection to the WDTVL often loses connectivity. I am thinking that the packet size settings were too high since the WDTVL is 10/100. I have since adjusted these to 1047 which appears to work fine. Just wondering if the bitrate is not the issue and it might be packet size.
I read an article that provided the following advice to test the upper allowable packet size for your connection. At the dos prompt type “ping -f -l 1047 ?.?.?.?” The ?.?.?.? being what ever your IP address is for your WDTVL, it’ll tell you whether the data can be transmitted in a full packet and how long it took. You can raise the packet size gradually to test your connection capacity.
Just a suggestion.
