Hey all: Great forum. Bought this unit so I could put all of my autistic sons 200 videos in one place so I don’t have to trip over his mountains of videos. He watches all .avi stuff like Disney movies, Barney, Sing Along, and so on. Recorded them onto my computer using Dazzle. Today when setting up the WD system, none of the videos will play. Message says “Unable to play selected file. Please see the User Manual for a list of supported file formats”. .avi obviously is supported so what am I doing wrong? Thanks for your help.
AVI is a CONTAINER that can have many codecs. The codec used by DAZZLE was probably DV, which is not supported. You can confirm by posting the text output of MEDIAINFO here. You can get MEDIAINFO at mediainfo.sourceforge.net.
Once we get that, we can offer suggestions on what to do next.
Tony:
I think this is what you wanted me to get. It’s a text view of one of the videos from MediaInfo:
General
Complete name : C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\My Videos\Cody’s Movies\Return of Jafar.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format_Commercial_IfAny : DVCPRO
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 26.3 GiB
Duration : 2h 3mn
Overall bit rate : 30.5 Mbps
Video
ID : 0
Format : DV
Format_Commercial_IfAny : DVCPRO
Codec ID : dvsd
Codec ID/Hint : Sony
Duration : 2h 3mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 24.4 Mbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Standard : NTSC
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:1:1
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Interlaced
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 2.357
Stream size : 24.8 GiB (94%)
Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Codec ID/Hint : Microsoft
Duration : 2h 3mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 1.32 GiB (5%)
Interleave, duration : 40 ms (1.20 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 240 ms
It’s all greek to me. . . .
Yep, it’s DV format, and that’s not playable by WDTVs. In fact, it’s not playable by most streamers. You might be able to convert the file with HandBrake into an MKV file. Chances are it will be much smaller, too. In addition, your Dazzle probably included software to convert them to mpeg, or you might even be able to use the Windows Movie maker to convert to WMV. All of these are supported formats.
Thanks so much. I’ll try to convert them to something else.
I am having the same problem with my WD TV Live player. It won’t play any of my avi files which play perfectly on my WD TV Live Plus. I already tried resetting the unit and placing all my movies inside a master folder and deleting the wdtv file that the player writes onto the 500gb powered Cavalry external hard drive.
Thanks for your help!
Here is the Mediainfo run for one of the movies:
Complete name : J:\Movies\State of Play.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format profile : OpenDML
File size : 1.81 GiB
Duration : 2h 1mn
Overall bit rate : 2 133 Kbps
Video
ID : 0
Format : mp43
Codec ID : mp43
Duration : 2h 1mn
Bit rate : 1 987 Kbps
Width : 640 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 30.000 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.216
Stream size : 1.68 GiB (93%)
Audio
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 2h 1mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 1.21 MiB (0%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 2400 ms (71.99 video frames)
Writing library : LAME3.98
