I searched the forums but I appear to be the only one experiencing this problem. I have owned the WD TV Live for about 6 months now and it’s been working great, however tonight it started having some problems. While I was watching a downloaded show the video stopped about 15 minutes into the show. The WD would respond to the remote but the screen wouldn’t change, just frozen on one image. I shut the WD down, waited about 5 minutes a rebooted. Now I can’t get it to load any of the content on my WD 2TB External Hard Drive. The HD is still recognized and I can access the files but once I select a file to play I only get a black screen with the blue loading circle in the middle and it never loads the content.
Anyone else experienced this? I shut it down for about 4-5 hours and then tried again and it still didn’t work.
Also, I saw that disconnecting an HD without “ejecting” could corrupt your external HD. Where is the eject button? I’d like to not ruin 2TB worth of media.
My WDTV Live stopped playing everything yesterday. It just shows the “loading” spinner.
If I do a factory reset, wait for the reboot and then pull the power, and let it restart, it will let me play a file. But only one. It will go back to just show the loading spinner if I try to view another one (or the same one again).
It is not really functional like this. Does anyone have an idea what else to try? My only option seems to bring it back to where I bought it and get another one.
My WDTV Live stopped playing everything yesterday. It just shows the “loading” spinner.
If I do a factory reset, wait for the reboot and then pull the power, and let it restart, it will let me play a file. But only one. It will go back to just show the loading spinner if I try to view another one (or the same one again).
It is not really functional like this. Does anyone have an idea what else to try? My only option seems to bring it back to where I bought it and get another one.
Welcome to the forums.
You may have played a “bad” file – certain MKVs are known to do this (others might as well, but MKVs made with MKVMerge greater than 4.0 definitely can do this).
Check your files with MediaInfo and if they are made with MKVMerge fix them with MKVMerge 4.0 (or earlier). Otherwise post the MediaInfo for a file and we can see if it’s causing the issue.
I don’t think there is problem with files. I have the same problem with loading files, just the blue annoying circle going round and round, the picture slide show works well, Youtube i don’t know, did’t try. Network work well i can see network disk on my PC, delate, copy, paste, viwe files etc. Box work well four 3 months and now this. I tray everything i can find on forums, but still nothing.
Sorry if my Englis is bad. Hope we’ll find a solution.
You may have played a “bad” file – certain MKVs are known to do this (others might as well, but MKVs made with MKVMerge greater than 4.0 definitely can do this).
Check your files with MediaInfo and if they are made with MKVMerge fix them with MKVMerge 4.0 (or earlier). Otherwise post the MediaInfo for a file and we can see if it’s causing the issue.
Thank you for the tip. Actually the problem showed up after i tried to play a mkv-file i hadn’t played before. The box has been working perfectly for a few weeks, since I bought it. Maybe there is a bug in the WDTV codec that crashes for broken files, so badly that it breaks the box?
I will try to reset to factory settings, reboot with the little button and keep away from the supposedly broken mkv-file. I will get back to you after I find out how it works for me.
I’ve been following some of the other forums, many users reporting this problem -including myself…
I find it intersting, why was everythig running just fine, then suddenly “out of the blue” this bug pops up? -What caused it? Assuming nothing changed on the WDTV (I know mine has not) it must be network share related. Personally I think MS pushed out a patch in the past 4 weeks that created this “spinning blue wheel of nothing”
The “Cause” is that the author(s) of MKVMerge, in versions 4.1 and later, decided to make the DEFAULT behavior to enable Header Compression.
The first version to introduce this was released in early July 2010, so these things are popping up with increasing regularity. Before July, nobody (or, at least VERY FEW people) had ever heard of it, let alone USED it.
My setup was running 5x5 no problems at all, then one day it just started. Movies and MKV’s I have watched many times now will only play once -after a hard reboot. I have tested on many files in my collection old and new. In my case this is NOT related to the MKV issuse. The blue spinney circle thingy happens on 1:1 BluRay M2ts files, Divix and raw AVI files from my digital camera. -All these files played just fine until “something” changed. I believe it was a MS patch on my WHS, I am in the middle of carefully uninstalling a month worth of patches to hopefully find the culprit…
This is still a very strange issue, how one ‘malformed?’ file can cause the Live to behave the way it does…
Cheers,
BR
The one file causes the wdtv to hang up and thats why files that you know are OK don’t play. A lot of programs and designs have good error handling which means that they can gracefully back out of a problem. Obviously the WDTV has not got this type of error handling and therefore it does know what to do if it comes across this type of problem.
If you had read the other posts you would see that this problem is one of the most talked about things. If you have learned only one thing from coming to a forum it should be that you take notice of the advice given.
I will try to reset to factory settings, reboot with the little button and keep away from the supposedly broken mkv-file. I will get back to you after I find out how it works for me.
I just wanted to confirm that the work-around works for me. As long as I don’t touch the file that the WDTV can not handle, everything is fine.
Is there still a patch coming for this issue? Are people still having this issue?
I am, and the work around does not seem to work either
If the problem is due to a ‘bad’ mkv then I believe that the latest beta firmware solves this. Of course if the work around does not solve your problem then maybe something else is to blame. Start a new thread with your current problem.
