It appears the forums are now back online, so I thought I’d check in to see if anybody’s made any progress with this issue that’s plaguing everyone. After dealing with a couple of weeks of constant lockups and low memory, I finally rolled back the firmware to 2.01.86 on both my devices. I haven’t had the lockups, but now I’m back to my previous beef with that firmware. I pretty much exclusively stream from network shares, and 2.01.86 constantly complains about an invalid username/password every time I connect. Usually a 2nd or 3rd try (not actually changing the username or password fields) works, but sometimes it takes 5 or 6 tries to finally get it to connect. That was at least one thing that 2.02.32 did seem to fix. I contemplated re-upgrading the firmware back to 2.02.32 to see if that would do anything, but I read in another thread that somebody tried that to no avail and started experiencing the lockups pretty much immediately.
All I can say is “ditto” to everyone else’s experiences. I have tried everything I can over the last few days except rolling back to a previous version of the firmware that I was also having different freezing problems with. I thought the freezing may have been due to overheating but that is definitely not the case now (cool ambient temperature and the box with good ventilation feels cool to touch). Movies freeze then sometimes start up again then jump ahead then again freeze, sound continues to play if my remote recognizes a command to stop the movie, and I can only fix everything by a hard boot before the freezing inevitably returns a bit later. I am heartened that this appears to be a firmware issue because the same thing is happening to all of us and WD should be able to fix it. One of my sons living 15km away has some freezing problems with his WD TV too, and my brother living 50km away has the same problems as me and is moving to a stand alone computer to bypass his WD TV. Mr WD, please help us?
Not great new look on the forum. Awful to use on a mobile device!!!
Anyway I got one of my two boxes replaced with newest model and it was still locking up regularly. I notice in the build up to a big freeze when the device is on standby is fervent internet activity. The switch powering the WD goes crazy with rapid led illuminations. So clearly the box is reconciling something Internet side and never resolves. Resulting in eventual freeze. The only thing I did was reboot and then left the WD on for a couple hours. Then put it to sleep/standby and since Sunday no freezes. Maybe it was finally able to reconcile what it wanted to do because it wasn’t in sleep mode. Ok it’s remained in sleep since then. But I always check to see if I can get network access to the HD connected via USB and so far it always responds. Will continue to monitor but clearly the reason for pickups is external, something pushing WD/ cloud side or even through one of the native apps. It eventually overwhelms the box. I had turned off miracast before which didn’t help and also disabled firmware auto checks. Neither helped. The problem is WD side for sure. Maybe there is something in the fact that if one checks for a firmware update it fails. Could there be some link that throws the box into a strop (even if someone disables the auto check). It’s no co incidence many are having big issues
I do have tried everything with the latest firmware apart from disconnecting the wireless network as I need that. I use my box to stream from a the local connected HDD as well as over wireless from my NAS and my windows PC, all using linux shares. Never used any of the “apps” at all. Still plagued with lockups etc, I reset the device a few times, tried with media server on and off, disabled miracast as well as turned check for new firmware off, Nothing helped, it still became sluggish before locking up, sometimes the video would stop, other times it would continue but the only way to stop it was to unplug the device. I have had this device on the new firmware since release and only started getting these problems a couple of weeks ago.
So the only thing was to rollback the firmware to 2.01.86, that was a bit scary as it froze on reboot! Unplugged it and on restart it said insert a USB device to recover my device, luckily it did, I turned media server back on too, turned off check for new firmware and since then no problems.
This is all so weird…
I seem to be a bit of an anomaly here, given that I experienced pretty much what everyone else did. I ended up leaving the box unplugged overnight, and came back to it the next day to find operational again.
Unfortunately this was temporary, and back it went to the missing services and locking up with unnerving regularity.
What I did then was roll back the firmware to 1.16.13 (an accident, this; I’d prepared USB sticks with this and 2.01.86, and forgot what was where), run under that for a while (and check the system parameters), then step up to 2.01.86, running under that for a while to confirm things were going smoothly.
And then, just for the hell of it, back up to 2.02.32. I turned off WiFi Direct as some else had mentioned, and then put the box through its paces. With one blip (services vanished again, and a reboot fixed that) it’s been chugging along as usual since.
It may be that rolling back the firmware for some distance is the trick, which might suggest that the current firmware is getting corrupted somehow.
Hey Lynnskii, I had the same issue (login password) before to upgrade the firmware 1½ year ago.
Now I rolled back like everyone did to fix the freezing issue but I no longer have the login pass issue.
The only thing that changed is my upgrade from win8 to Windows10. Is there any link between this issue and the OS?
Possibly. I’m streaming from a Server 2012 box (equivalent to Win 8, except there’s no “free upgrade” path). barrygreybeard suggested in another thread setting up and using NFS instead. I might give that a shot. If I get some time, I also might try rolling the firmware forward again like DAMcDonald to see if anything changes.
Many have suspected some kind of phone-home issue either to WD or from one of the apps, which Scottyboy99 seems to confirm. I disabled all internet traffic to my box via the router while leaving local network access, and it would still lock up, so clearly something is still trying very hard to connect to or find something.
Same problems here guys. Unresponsive remote, freezes and power cycling the device every 15mins. Fw 2.02.32
All started before I upgraded to Win10 so I can rule that one out. Keeping fingers crossed now, because there’s 1 change now: tried to check for latest firmware on the device today at it said “Your media player is up to date”. That’s a step up from “Unable to check…” Maybe we are not abandoned after all cause WD put their update server back online
When I talked about the OS … It was for the login-pass issue on the old firmware… Not the main issue (freeze) with the last firmware.
I rolled back to previous firmware and everything is smooth as a babies bottom again. Going to disable firmware upgrade check ASAP!
Rolling back to 2.01.86 did the job. Everything is running fine for the 3rd day in a row. Still missing some response from WD. Did anyone try to mail to their support?
Still waiting for WD’s official position regarding this critical and sudden issue!
But seriously please don’t tell rolling back the FW is the solution… It’s a shame.
For the moment I unplugged from the network but I won’t accept this for a long time :[
Hello,
2 friends of mine plus myself have been experiencing the very same problems reported here, all of a sudden.
Seeing the # of people reporting the same issues, almost sure that the device is trying to access whatever site on the internet and this is causing all of those problems.
No other option that rolling back to previous FW …
I’m not sure which solution helped me, but since removing top lid and downgrading firmware back to 2.01.86, my player has stopped freezing and is now working perfectly fine!
What does top lid mean?
Ok, tried something different last night.
Instead of playing movies back via network (NAS boxes) like I normal do…
I copied 3 movies over to a USB drive and played them.
Normally the issues I have been having are:
- Movie freezing during playback.
- Pausing a movie caused the movie to “crash” and jump out to the file selection screen (with audio still playing), then re-selecting the movie causes the spinning orange “circle of death”.
I have 2 different WD TV (Gen 3) boxes, one with the latest firmware, the other with the firmware rolled back to the previous version. On network playback both firmware had issues with pausing, but the rolled back firmware did not freeze during playback.
During USB playback, the one with the latest firmware locked up during playback. However, the rolled back firmware had no issues with freezing and was able to pause with no issues.
Everything seems to be fine on a LOCAL source but network has issues…
So, I guess my question is… what would cause the pause issues via network even on the rolled back firmware?
Well, I’m just adding that I have the same experience as all the rest. I was on 2.02.32, working fine for months, then suddenly a couple weeks ago it started freezing. Even when it was just sitting on the screensaver, it would freeze. Only way out was to yank the power cord.
Once I saw an “low on memory” message.
Never used any of the apps.
I always had “new firmware check” set to off.
Went back to 1.16.13 and everything is fine.
Tada 
(no top lid) … try not to spill anything into it 
I’m having the exact same issue with my unit. Constantly freezing or complaining about memory problems. Will try to roll back to FW 2.01.86 if I can figure out how…
here’s my step by step guide (click “2.02.32 Firmware no longer allows content?”)
