Well, quite interesting the bugs that seem to pop up when playing around with this feature, and many factors seem to be involved. I would love to explore with a debugger on the WD Live ;-).
There seems to be little rhyme or reason, but anecdotally the older the Codec and container mix, the better chance you have on getting it to play. Originally, I thought it could also be something on the network server, not just the WD Live, but since XBMC seems to work like a banshee with the same server, content, latency, and files, so now I think different. Whatever it is, it appears to occur under similar situations on other embedded chipset devices I have been working on Play-to with, to include Samsung DLNA TV sets and Thompson STB devices. I am guessing embedded devices are skimping a bit close to the edge on memory and cpu to support the heavy resources required for MPEG4 processing.
FWIW, newer DivX containers with MPEG-4 DivX 5 BVOP encoded by the DivX pro package appear to play fine from a LAN share, but choke when playing across WAN segments.The same connection however seems to be ok with WMV containers with VC!/WMA, and Old AVI containers are almost always flawless too. Since it chokes mainly when MPEG codecs are invoked, this seems to point to some kind of buffer or cpu shortage when doing MPEG decoding from the network.
Perhaps it is gravity waves too, I don’t know. I’ll wrap the device in foil tonight just in case
Love to hear some input from a WD engineer on this.
I brought up the DLNA certification of the WDTV Live Plus because there seemed to be a question of whether or not it was even supposed to be a DMR.
I don’t think any of the DMCs I have tried have been certified. As far as I can tell, either they don’t certify software solutions or no one has tried to certify software. I have tried all of these DMCs with other DMRs with great success. The DMCs can even control the DMRs volume output. When I pair these DMCs with the WDTVL+ here is what I have found so far:
They all find the WDTVL+ on the network just fine.
When I try to play a list of MP3s here is what happens:
Windows 7 Media Player using “Play to” - tested this morning - works fine.
Foo_Upnp - usually cuts out after a few seconds but may make it through a couple of songs before dying.
Kinsky Desktop - plays 1 song and then stops.
Cidero Media Controller - nothing plays.
Asset Control - nothing plays.
eezupnp - nothing plays.
(volume control didn’t work with any of the DMCs)
So, when I saw the post “Developer report of bugs in WD TV Live Plus DMR” it just rang true. The WDTVL+ is a good DMP. The WDTVL+ is not ready for prime time as a DMR.
What I don’t understand is that the Live is classified as a DMP and so is the Live Hub. However the Live Plus is classified as a DMR. What makes the LIve Plus different?
Looks like volume adjust is also working with EyeCon, the media-management app. It’s about time! I highly recommend using EyeCon especially now that WD have resolved volume issues. www.eyecontec.com
While the recent fix for volume control indicates that WD is working on the DMR functionality, it appears that WD still has some work to do. The WDTVL+ still does not work consistently as a DMR with the following Windows based DMCs:
The Foobar2000 component “foo_upnp” was just updated to include a fix for WDTV Live. It now works great as a UPnP Controller with the WDTV Live Plus. So now you can either:
a. Use the WDTV Live Plus to “pull” songs from a FB2K server, or
b. Use the FB2K (with foo_upnp) UPnP Controller to “push” songs to the WDTV Live Plus.
