I´m using a WD TV Live, happy with it so far, but there is an issue that keeps bothering me.
The WD does seam to lack contrast/saturation/brightness adjust and that , i believe, causes to have a very pale image.
Adjusting the settings on the tv does not work because the image becomes very saturated.
After comparing the WD to another media player the difference become even more clear, so the question is, can i, does th WD TV support adjust of these settings?
I have seen the issue on a Panasonic Plasma TV. The HDMI handshaking is not communicating properly. Reset your digital TV to the factory default settings and manually set up your HDMI inputs on your digital TV and WDTV Live HDMI output.
It could be something to do with the firmware you are using. I know that you are using un-official firmware but just recently WD released a firmware update that made the picture washed out.
There are no colour adjustments in the WDTV Live; if the colour is washed out return the box for a warranty repair/replacement. The unofficial firmware contains no firmware changes and is identical in performance to the stock WD firmware, including WD’s bugs. I have tested both. The only difference between the unofficial firmware and stock WD firmware is that the unofficial firmware contains movie sheets editing, a computer accessible backend and the provision to bypass the buggy Windows Samba driver.
The WD boxes use Sigma 865x chips. According to the publicly available information published by Sigma, the 865x chips are a hardware device manufactured to international digital broadcast standards not computer software codec devices. The WDTV box software is only used to switch the various digital modes. The same chips are used in free to air; satellite and cable set top boxes and PVR’s. There are no reports on any of the technical forums of the 865x chips misbehaving. In fact the opposite is reported; brilliant high definition colour and resolutions. If the colours displayed on your digital TV are not HDTV broadcast standard resolution you have either a defective WDTV box or your settings are mismatched to your digital TV. All reports have indicated that the mismatch is usually in the digital TV settings. Installing the WDLXTV flash will not resolve the video issue.
I have the same issue. It’s not so bad that the picture is unwatchable, and many people might not even realize that a problem exists. However, the image does look pale and washed out compared to, say, HDMI coming directly from my computer.
This was a big issue for me at initial setup, but I quiickly determined that using the Component connection instead of HDMI gives me what I want. As it turns out, my projector at startup doesn’t recognize HDMI from the WDTV piped through my Pioneer receiver, so using Component is the workaround for both issues.
Frankly, as Steve Jobs says about Apple TV, the WDTV feels more like a hobby than a commercial product. Since I’ve been able to get it to work well in my specific setup, and it was pretty cheap to buy, I’m happy and can live with its quirks, though it would be nice if WD would actually fix more bugs.