Picked up a new WD TV Live Plus from trhe local bestbuy yesterday . I’ve been playing with it a lot the past day and here’s what I’ve found in the way of bugs that need to be corrected. The order is from major to minor
1 While playing a 2 hour AVI after about 40-50 min 's the audio becomes noticably out of sync with the video. I’ve seen this issue in past WD TV Live posts and it was corrected with Firmware. but it seems to be back on the Plus unit.
2 While playing short mixed videos (AVI’s mpg’s, Wmv’s and mov’s) After the first video is over it goes back to the menu instead of playing the next video. Why can’t you have the video player act like a music CD player when song #1 is over it just continues to song #2?
3 As work around to the above problem I diiscoverd that if I hit the next button on the remote before the end of the video it will go to the next video . The problem with this is that if I have 10 videos and I hit next and watch 7 of the 10 videos this way, when I hit stop and the menu comes up video #1 is highlighted instead of video 7. If I wanted to to continue watching videos 8-10 i have to scroll 7 clicks and highlight video #8 and continue this way.
4 When fast forwarding video The transparent black time bar looks cool but you can’t see the bottom 1/4 of the video! How about either making it clear or having the option for menu colors?
5 I hooked to a old Toshiba SDTV that has YPbPn inputs and no matter what settings I tried the TV didn’t like it. Its not the TV because a DVD player works just fine using those imputs.
6 It seemed to have issues with Mediafly. Not sure if its the unit or Mediafly.
7 When playing older non supported video formats , Why should I have to press OK every time it comes up with this message? Why can’t the player just say “unsupport file format” and move on. The buttons on the remote will quickly wear out the way the player is setup now.
While this is my first WD TV unit and I think the concept of a Streaming Media Player is great It seems to fall short on the functional video player part. As comparison media player you should look at the Philips 5990/5992 DVD player. While this unit is getting old, the usb menu system is crude, it has trouble with larger hard drives and doesn’t support some of the newer video formats After all of that It’s usb video player works GREAT!
The audio doesn’t lag the video, it goes tro the next video without having to play menu games, The fast forwarding is very good and you can FF up to 32X instead of 16X. All it says when its fastforwarding / rewinding is a small symbol at the top of the screen instead of a giant black bar at the bottom of the screen. Plus on top of that it doesn’t black out and have to think what to do next for a second like the WD TV Liive Plus has to do.
As a Senior EE with 25 years of experence a bit of advice, Keep it simple but functional. You have a ways to go.
