There is one familiar fault that I have noticed throughout all the versions of firmware for both the Live and Live Plus, and
what happens is If you attempt to play a video that the device cannot handle you get the Circle of Death, you can back arrow out, and see the files listed, and if you attempt to play a known good file of any other type you still get the Circle of Death, the ONLY way to get it to play the known good file is to Unplug the power jack or adapter, and then reboot up and then it will play that known good file. Why does it do this ? seems if you back out of the Circle of Death the unit should be able to function, but NO, is it stuck in somekind of background task ?
Back before .mkv header compression was patched, not only would files not play, but every time I turned my WDTV on after playing a “bad” file it had the stuff at the top with the file name, as if it was playing the video file as an audio file in the background while I navigated the menu.
That kinda shows that the playback code within the chip was stuck in some kind of loop, since play of any file (audio or video) does not resume when you reboot the device.
I had to leave it unplugged for an extended period of time for the processor to finally be volatile.
Western Digital needs to add a in menu reboot option, its a pain to have to get behind the unit in the entertainment center and un-plug it to get it working again. It has a reset settings, but why cannot it also have a reboot unit option to clear out the lock-up circle of death behavior ???
Even though they’re named “non-volatile” because you can’t _ count _ on them to retain their state when power is re-applied, they generally do, more often than not. If the POST sequence didn’t specifically overwrite the RAM, then if you turned off your Commodore 64 and then turned it back on a while later, your program (and data) would generally have been intact.
If the processor is stuck in a loop that it can’t break out of, then you can’t just add “pretty please stop what you’re doing” to the bootup instructions… you have to leave power disconnected long enough for the chip to actually forget what it was doing. In one case, even an hour wasn’t long enough to “fix” one of my stuck WDTVs.
I used to have a similar problem on an older piece of network gear; if you unplugged it, it would still remember for a significant amount of time due to capacitors holding a minimal charge, enough charge to keep the processor thinking. With the vendor, we tried something that proved successful in immediately removing any remaining charge. We removed power and shorted the DC inputs. This ‘bled’ the remaining charge.
I absolutely do not recommend doing this, but if someone has a Live/Plus they want to experiment on, you could pull the power connector from the WDTV and short the DC input on the box for a few seconds. It should bleed off the remaining charge.
Back before .mkv header compression was patched, not only would files not play, but every time I turned my WDTV on after playing a “bad” file it had the stuff at the top with the file name, as if it was playing the video file as an audio file in the background while I navigated the menu.
I had to leave it unplugged for an extended period of time for the processor to finally be volatile.
I use to have to fix the headers with that tool mkWDclean.exe or whatever it was called, but a simple unplug and re-plug
would always get mine out of that Circle of Death.
bluebird wrote:
I use to have to fix the headers with that tool mkWDclean.exe or whatever it was called, but a simple unplug and re-plug would always get mine out of that Circle of Death.
Well, my issue was with a Gen1 WDTV HD, which behaved slightly differently to the compression issue. It didn’t have the Circle of Death, instead you just got a black screen with nothing happening. If you pressed “Back”, the indication at the top of the screen, while you were navigating the menu, was as if an audio file was being played, but it had the name of the “bad” .mkv video file.
That’s how I ended up here (but in the Gen1 section). I was trying to figure out how [Deleted] to fix it. Everyone was just saying “push the reset – it’ll be fine”, “reset to factory defaults – it’ll be fine”, “unplug it and plug it back in – it’ll be fine”. I tried all that and it was still powering up “stuck” and I was starting to worry… “just unplug it for 10 minutes – it’ll be fine”. As I said, not only did 10 minutes not work, but a full hour didn’t work! I was flipping out. I ended up leaving it unplugged for 24 hours (after all, I had nothing to lose – couldn’t use it anyways as it was), and by then all was normal again.
Well, regardless of nomenclature, it does seem to be a design issue in the chips themselves.
Since there’s actually several “processors” within the chip, it seems readily apparent that the main processor can be re-initialized (as you’d expect), but there doesn’t seem to be an ability to “break” some of the other processing tasks out of loops they may get stuck in.
