WD TV Live Streaming Media Player

MarkJ  >>>>  You can bet that the next version of the box will get tested pretty thoroughly!

We would assume this is SOP with any new products from WD and any other major manufacturers, and I do know that WD beta tests products pretty thoroughly.  Nevertheless,  glitches can get through no matter how much testing is done to prevent it.

Sonjadt wrote:

My next challenge will be accessing movies on my laptop; without the external (portable) hard-drive, relying totally on my WiFi

Any suggestions guys?

 

:womanhappy:

 

Or will that be another chapter in ‘The Days of my SMP’ :womanwink:

It all depends upon how “good” your WiFi is – meaning signal strength between devices and router and laptop speeds (G vs N vs dual-band)

My whole home system is wired vs wireless.  I do not wirelessly stream from a computer or laptop.  Don’t have to since both are wired in, BUT, I could do it if I needed to, because my wireless is good and robust. 

My main wireless streaming is done from iPads and Kindles (and iPhone) to and from drives in the network; including those plugged into the WD (and from virtual drives I have on the Internet and even through internet from anywhere to my home drives) .  All done successfully for the most part.   At home, if I am too far from a wireless signal, then there is stuttering and jitter and sometimes total stopping.  I have recently put some WD range extenders around the house to boost signals too far from router in our two-story house, and that helps.  To stream quality video from home to my iPad while I am away from home, requires both locations to have top notch internet bandwidth.  I have it, but does the other location have it – that is the main issue one faces under this condition.

Anyway, I could go on, but just understand that streaming video via wi-fi has its own set of issues.

Bottom line is that for wireless to work well with streaming media, it will likely require upgrades, like a new wireless N router if you do not have a modern one (i.e. made during last 5 years).

So, get started and let us know how it goes; preferably in a new thread specific to the issue you experience.

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mike27oct wrote:
Any confirmations regarding this?  Does it appear the problem was in early players or later on in the product cycle?


My confirmation is my own experience I had with a borrowed USB3 drive that did not work on 2 SMPs while the other one did just fine. So far it hasn’t been narrowed down to anything and it seems to be a tough one.

Sonjadt wrote:

My next challenge will be accessing movies on my laptop; without the external (portable) hard-drive, relying totally on my WiFi

Any suggestions guys?

 

:womanhappy:

 

Or will that be another chapter in ‘The Days of my SMP’ :womanwink:

If your movies are in a shared folder on your laptop then you should be able to select it from the WD player. You then select the movie you want to play.

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Techflaws >>>  My confirmation is my own experience I had with a borrowed USB3 drive that did not work on 2 SMPs while the other one did just fine. So far it hasn’t been narrowed down to anything and it seems to be a tough one.

As we know, USB3 is supposed to be backward compatible with USB2 devices.  So far, I have found this to be true, although I do not recall if I ever connected a USB3 drive to my Live Plus units.

The WD My Passport drives are USB 3.0 and work fine with my WD TV Live SMP.

I have two SMPs.  One was purchased four months ago.  Both will disconnect USB 3.0 WD portable drives at odd times while watching a show.  There are never any problems when using the front USB port. Not everybody experiences problems like this, but a huge number of problems are solved for those who are having them by simply using the front USB port rather than the rear. 

This is not just an opionion.  It’s a fact reported on this forum and others by tons of people.  This is the sort of thing WD employees should have noticed when using the units in their own homes. Perhaps they did–too late.  I like the SMP plenty.  I just stay away from the rear port.

Well, if the flaw is in the chips or other hardware, then firmware can’t help the situation, unfortunately.

MarkJ wrote:
This is the sort of thing WD employees should have noticed when using the units in their own homes.

Unless of course they have HDDs that do not exhibit this kinda problem. Apparently there are lots of those out there. I mean, since a year or so USB3 is what people are buying and you’d get a lot more complaints if all of those drives would be failing on the backport.

Hey guys.

I tried the USB at the back of the SMP, and it’s not caused any problems. Maybe they’ve fixed it up since.

How’s it all working for you now?

Hi Mike27oct

Thanks to you guys, it’s been going great guns. Dad and I were able to watch a Bette Davis movie; “Dead Ringer”  that I had downloaded via Vuze, which for some reason I was unable to burn to DVD properly. Watching it on the computer it was in perfect sync, however, on DVD it was severely out of sync. That is the reason why I thought “Get a SMP”, I thought buying a SMP would save on unsucessful DVD burns, get rid of the DVD’s completely.

Since then I’ve downloaded a few more movies which I will be able to watch. I did plug the external (portable) hard-drive in the rear USB port and so far (touchwood) so good I’ve not had any problems.

Hope you got my separate post re: My thanks to you, RichUK, PGRated and MarkJ to say thank you. I have actually been telling people what wonderful support I’ve been getting from the ‘WD Community Forum’.

As I said before my next challenge will be to eliminate the external (portable) hard-drive and just watch them from my lap-top via SMP, however, I’ll give my brain a break :womanhappy: I’m just grateful for all the help that you guys have offered.

Thank you

Can you see your PC listed on the player when you select network shares as a source.

Techflaws wrote:


MarkJ wrote:
This is the sort of thing WD employees should have noticed when using the units in their own homes.


Unless of course they have HDDs that do not exhibit this kinda problem. Apparently there are lots of those out there. I mean, since a year or so USB3 is what people are buying and you’d get a lot more complaints if all of those drives would be failing on the backport.

Doubtful, I’ve had all my problems using various brand new WD protable drives.  Those drives are extremely popular and should have been connected to the rear port by more than a few WD employees IMO.  Those drives work everywhere else, so I believe it’s a stretch to think that the drives are exhibiting the problem.  I think it’s the SMP that’s the problem and WD employees should have recognized it.   Also note that problems have been reported with other drives than the portables I’m using.

Sonjadt

Yea, well, good luck with those torrent movies that may or may not be of good quality.  One gets what they pay for.  I don’t even mess with that.  I want quality-produced videos on my HDs, so I make my own using good programs.  The videos made from DVDs and blu-rays all work and all are in sync.  Having not only a blu-ray and WD player, but a Roku with Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc, a Netflix account with streaming and rental DVDs, and Comcast, too, I have all the videos I need to select from.

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:womanlol:

Admittedly dad and I are amateur movie watchers. We love the classic movies, you know, the likes of Bogart, Davis, Hepburn, Greenstreet, Crawford, Garland, Kelly, Crosby, Sinatra, Rogers, Astaire …

Living in Australia I have been unable to find a reliable website that provides classic movies for a reasonable price; and/or provides those rare movies which you find Sydney Greenstreet in. Although a friend did mention, just recently that Bigpond (Telstra, Australia) provides something similar which I will look into.

I have decided to invest in a DVD Recorder that provides ‘All regions’ so that I can purchase DVD’s from America.

So far … so good the movies that I get from torrent have been okay. If they’re not … I delete them and try again.

Otherwise, thank you for your response. I do have Eset Nod32 on my system to counter-act virus’ and the bittorrent Vuze (Azuerus) has an anti-virus attached to the ‘paid’ version.

:womanhappy:

MarkJ wrote:
Those drives work everywhere else, so I believe it’s a stretch to think that the drives are exhibiting the problem.

It’s a stretch all right, cause I never said that. I said that the problem apparently is not as common as it’s made out to be since pretty much all current drives are USB3 and there aren’t remotely that many complaints about this bug.

Sonjadt  >>>>   I have decided to invest in a DVD Recorder that provides ‘All regions’ so that I can purchase DVD’s from America.

I hope you know that a DVD Recorder does not copy commercial DVDs.  That takes special PC software that breaks the copy-protection, and then other software to turn it into an ISO file and/or burn to a disc.

I have a DVD Recorder, that plays them of course, but it also records from the cable TV box’s drive and on-demand shows, or since I have a Laser Disc player and disks, I have used it to convert some of my laser discs to DVD disc and/or ISO files for playing on the WD.

Getting a region-free player makes sense for you in Oz.  the esteemed Joey Smythe at this forum lives there, too, so why not ask him for some advice about this?

Sonjadt wrote:

:womanlol:

 

Admittedly dad and I are amateur movie watchers. We love the classic movies, you know, the likes of Bogart, Davis, Hepburn, Greenstreet, Crawford, Garland, Kelly, Crosby, Sinatra, Rogers, Astaire

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

 

Have a look here. You may find something you like.

 

 

https://archive.org/details/Film_Noir

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Thank you for that @RichUK

I will ‘bookmark’ it.

:womanhappy: