WD TV (2014) Sluggish behaviour compared to other WD TV media players?

I have a WD TV HD Media Player Gen 2 (Not Live), I bought it around '07/'08

This player has been great but I have needed to convert my files to .avi to ensure they all play properly.

All files are 720p

As we moved to a bigger house I wanted another unit so the obvious choice was the 2014 (live) edition

specially as it is supposed to play 99% of formats.

This is my set up - 

2x Western Digital Elements 2TB desktop hard drives

1x  2TB  for Movies I have converted to AVI from DVD

1x  2TB  for TV Shows converted (as above) or downloaded

My basic Movie drive set up is folders of Genres eg

Movies (Used about 1.6TB)

Box Sets - Each set has separate folder (ie ALIEN contains movies 1-2-3 &4)

Drama - 

Adventure

SciFi

Horror

Foreign - Some movies with subs in separate folders

Romance

Childrens

etc most folders contain - Individual movies with covers

TV Shows Disc (Used about 1.4TB)

TV Shows - Each Show in separate folder

Misc

Best Of

Live Shows

Docco

Music Docco

etc

I have added dvd cover art images for all movies, max 600 pixels high x ? wide, 72dpi sRGB files

My old WD TV HD Media Player Gen 2 plays both of these drives faultlessly and skipping through the menus

with the cover art runs as fast as I can press the next button, you really have to race to beat the machine.

What I have found with the new WD TV (2014 edition) media player using the SAME hard drives plugged in

via 2x USB ports is that it is slightly slower to access on my TV shows HD and the Box Set section of my

Movies HD (nothing to really worry about)

BUT!!!

To access all other files, ie DRAMA, HORROR etc where there is a folder, with say 100 movies, the media

player becomes unbearably SLOW.

The window loads with 16 titles, to scroll to each title takes about 2 seconds but to flip to the next page takes

10 to 12 seconds so in theory if it takes 10 seconds to swap to a page plus about 8 seconds to navigate

across a page that is 18 seconds.

I have 210 movies in Comedies that would equate to almost 1hour to navigate through one genre.

(This is totally unacceptable)

This is not an issue on the Gen2 so why now?

Come on WD developers other people have companied about the sluggish performance what has

changed ** to cause such an issue.**

But like I have said earlier, in TV series, if I have one folder lets say Game Of Thrones with 12 episodes within

navigation is almost instantaneous across folders with cover art.

I have gone through all menu items and tried turning on and off various setting and have not yet even set up

for a wireless network or streaming and have has previous experience using Gen 2

I am debating returning my divice, the only reason I would keep it is because I got it on sale and there

is a workaround (get rid of any images) but I really don’t see why I should need to do this after paying 

good money for a divide that SHOULD be better then my old Gen2

Has any one else experienced such sluggish behaviour?

Dagil wrote: I have added dvd cover art images for all movies, max 600 pixels high x ? wide, 72dpi sRGB files

 

That’s the problem right there.   Thumbnails are too big  (the bigger they are, the slower the navigation gets)

here’s an example of people using the "inbuilt get content info scraper) … movies are fine, but tv shows are not  (which relates to Your Movies … since you are creating them without the scraper)

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming/Any-WD-Live-TV-hardware-improvements-in-past-3-years/m-p/802401#M33400

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Ideas/Please-Fix-TV-Shows-Thumbnail-Resolution/idi-p/835051

P.S. it’s been a long time since i used my Live Gen 2 … from memory it either compress the thumbnails, or displays them from cache (latest 2014 Media Player … seems to be displaying them from a local source ie. the BIG ones)

Hi Joey

Thanks for the response. I did look at that link before I posted my findings.

What I don’t understand is why when I create a master folder and then sub folders and dump an image around 80ish kb

and a (lets say) 800mb file I can skip over these almost seemlesly.

But if I asign exactly the same files into one master folder (with out a sub folder) everything slows down?

If it works with one set of images why not all, they are on the same hard drive

The work round is 

A - create smaller files for images (batch convert about 4000 images)

B - Add sub folders (adding and naming about 4000)

C - Delete all images

D - Try to buy a secondhand WD TV 2nd Gen player so there will be no issue

E - WD fix the issue as it was perfect before.

I am really not looking forward to converting 4000+ images so maybe the WD TV 2014 media player

would be better off returned.

Cheers

David

to confirm if i understand …

example A

MOVIES ------ Master Folder

Fury ------ Subfolder  (which contains Fury.mkv  Fury.jpg  or a folder.jpg)

Sin City ---- Subfolder  (which contains Sin City.mkv  Sin City.jpg  or a folder.jpg)

etc etc etc

example B

MOVIES ------ Master Folder  (which contains movie files and thumbnail jpg’s)

Fury.mkv

Fury.jpg

SinCity.mkv

Sin City.jpg

etc etc etc

So, you’re saying A is faster than B ?

A is most probably faster because the “folder images” are cached  (cache images are a Small Resolution)

where-as B the image is displayed from the local file (Large Resoluion in your case)

P.S. if  you decide to Batch convert 4000 images … that won’t take long (maybe an hour ?)

Also, if you decide to go the subfolder route,  Batch creating “Subfolders” is Very Quick and Easy as well.

http://www.thehtpc.net/htpc/file-to-folder-script/

eg. use Notepad … create a new text document *.txt and copy’n’paste this code

@echo off
for %%a in (.) do (
md “%%~na” 2>nul
move “%%a” “%%~na”
)

Close and Save … then rename the file *.bat and place it in your Master Movie Folder and double click it to run.

good thing, it will auto name the folder (movie name) and place all files in it eg. Fury.mkv and Fury.jpg will go into it.