I have recently got my WD TV Live, along with a WD My Book hard disk. It looks nice, it shows my pictures collection great, it even plays my music (.mp3 files). What it doesn’t do, is playing movies (which is why I actually got it).
I have tried to play first from the USB drive some digital copies from a few DVDs I recently purchased (.wmv files), both the PC version and the portable device version. No luck! The message I get is “Unable to play the selected file. Please refer to the user manual for a list of supported file formats.” .wmv IS a supported file format. Same story with an .avi file created by ripping one of the DVDs using freeware.
However, it play the .mpg file created from the same movie, using the same free software (the image quality is not great though).
My laptop has no problems playing any of these files.
There are different varieties of WMV and WDTV only plays WMV9 types. An .avi is just a container and can contain many different video and audio streams. Your computer has much more latitude in playing non-standard formats than a hardware device. The mpeg quality may be poor due to the encoder, poor quality original or low bit rate.
Any suggestions for a good, reliable DVD ripper, that can handle both regular DVDs and Blu-Ray DVDs (provided I have a Blu-Ray reader of course, which I don’t yet) and doesn’t compromise the quality, both video and audio?
What would be the preferred format to save/rip a DVD, so that I can navigate through the chapters and special features as I would do with the original DVD?
