VOB files won't compile

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
#1

Hi there, we’re running into a problem with reading .VOB files on an external hard drive connected to a WD TV Live Hub Media Center running most recent firmware 3.12.13.

I’ve copied the contents of a DVD that had home movies from the 90s burned onto it many years ago. The file structure is:

Folder VIDEO_TS
'>
VIDEO_TS.BUP
VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS.VOB
VTS_01_0.BUP
VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_0.VOB
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB
VTS_01_3.VOB
VTS_01_4.VOB
VTS_01_5.VOB

I list them like that because I have read that the order of these files matters.

From the home screen, we plug the external hard drive in to the front-facing USB port. Messages begin to flash at the top, then it hangs on “Compiling media library…” - it is not frozen because the ellipsis continue to loop, but it sticks there. I have read in another thread that this compiling process can take a long time (some users leave it overnight) but this HD only has 5 video files on it, no more than 5 GB taken up.

I’m not sure where to begin. I’ve got a few tests I want to run still, but I want to see if there’s something obvious the people in this community can see based on this description.

Some additional, possibly relevant information:

  • This is a brand new WD 4TB hard drive, My Passport Ultra for Mac.
  • All .VOB files are visible in Finder when the hard drive is plugged directly into the computer.
  • There is one other file on the drive, a folder called Backups.backupdb - when we installed the initial WD Discover software that comes with the hard drive, I believe it may have set the external HD as the backup DB for the Mac computer. Might this be the file that is causing the compiling to take so long?
  • We ran one other test yesterday, where we ONLY transferred the .VOB files to the hard drive, and then plugged that into the Media Hub. The files compiled, and we were able to watch them on the TV. At that time, I believe that Time Machine had NOT selected this external HD as backup disk.

Do we think that this backup file may be causing the Media Hub to lag on the compiling step as it tries to understand the complex file structure of a backup? Or is something else amiss here?

Thanks for all your help.

#2

When i used to use WDTV Media Players … i avoided using VOB files and just ripped the DVD’s to a Single ISO file and name it with a simple name eg. Home Movies.iso

Had no problems.

try using imgburn or similar software and convert your VIDEO_TS folder to an ISO Image file (you won’t lose any video quality and DVD menu structure will be intact) … in imgburn select “Create Image File from Files/Folders”

give that a try … and another thing to try is Disabling the Media Library, as the WDTV is probably trying to “scrape” your files for online media info. From memory i seldom used the Media Library “On” and media still played fine.

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