Watching BluRay Movies disconnects external HD

WD TV Live 3rd gen with 1.04.12 Firmware and WD MyBook Essential 3TB (newest 1007 firmware).

Problem with watching BluRay (1080p untouched from BD) movies, the player diconnects the external HD after a while (5 seconds to 20 minutes) and the movie freezes and sometimes gives the error message that the HD should be disonnected with the appropriate function.

This happens with all BluRay movies, i tried with iso, mkv, or m2ts, video codecs where VC1 or AVC. Audio DTS or TrueHD (also untouched from BD). I also tried with an older WD USB2 uncrypted drive and the same happened, the movie froze and the HD was disconnected.

Eveything else works fine. When the shared movies is accessed over the wireless network and played on a laptop it works fine.

Any suggestion would be highly appreciated.

Thanks a lot.

That’s odd, usually it’s the opposite with USB working better than network shares o.o

Update: The problem with the disconnected harddisk did not happen with a BluRay movie with MPEG2 video and AC3 audio

Update 2: While watching a BluRay movie with AVC and DTS-HD sound the harddisk disconnected only once while in cases with VC1 video they almost stopped immediately

Question is it a general problem to watch untouched (from bluray disc) movies with VC1 video?

(independently of the container format i.e. mkv or m2ts)

I am having the same issue watching random torrent files. I assumed it was my unit as my hard drive is brand new. So I exchanged my unit before the new firmware release. I was happy to see a new update and assumed my issue would be resolved. No luck. I don’t understand what is happening as my original Live player worked flawlessly. 

Are you also using a WD Essential 3TB drive?