WD TV Live SMP vs Hub

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
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Few specific questions that I didn’t see answered in other similar posts

  1. I bought a gen3 SMP last week.  I saw from previous posts that the gen3 verson of the SMP had locked firmware, making any custom firmware impossible.  From what I saw though, new Hubs still allowed you to flash the firmware with custom versions.  Is this true?
  2. My primary concern is having fast loading movie sheets and covers.  I’m not having great luck getting custom themes to display properly on my SMP, and backdrops and other data stored on my network shares are pretty laggy (takes 2 to 3 seconds for sheets to show up when selecting a movie).  I’ve also read that the SMP uses very grainy or low-res cover art.  While I don’t need the internal HDD in the hub for media storage, I’m curious if I can store metadata, backdrops and cover images on the Hub’s internal drive and have the actual media file (ISO, MKV or whatever) on a network share? Can anyone confirm the cover art issue?
  3. Any other thoughts on the Hub vs the SMP, other than the obvious wired/wireless and price difference?  I have all my media on external HDDs hanging off a small PC that acts as my file server.  I thought the SMP would be perfect considering I don’t need the extra space, but the firmware limitations, seemingly limited selection of themes for the SMP and lag when accessing data from the share make me thing the Hub is the way to go.

I appreciate any thoughts!!

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  1. There are no custom firmware available for the LIve Hub or Streaming, only for older models.

  2. AFAIK the metadata must be stored along with the media files, it may not work properly if is saved to another location.

  3. In overall the Live Hub has demonstrated to be more stable and have better performance and theme customization than the Streaming.

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