I recently purchased a new WDTV Live to replace my previous no wifi model which had started to act eratically - needed to be rebooted all the time that sort of thing. Well imagine my surprise when the new one I just purchased did exactly the same thing. Only even worse. It can no long manage satying connected to my NAS - netwrok shares works intermittently. Photos are no long viewable in their full resolution. The list goes on.
I then went searching for issues realted to this prodauct - WOW! I’ve never come across so much disgruntlement about a product. Most of it relating to firmware issues and how every up date has made the product worse. So I have wasted money buying a new model because it runs on the same firmware and subsequent updates., I have spent a lot of hours trying to find an appropriate resolve for those issues and Western Digital by all accounts on the net continues to sell and curiosly supply updates that don’t for a product that should have been recalled. Because it is unable to do the fundamental task that it was advertised capable of. So How do I get my money back and compensation for all the time I have wasted with this product. If a new firmware had come out to resolve these issue I would be so annoyed but this is a deliberate grab for cash for a product that WD is aware does not work and at very best they have been unable to adequately resolve. I dont think being told to unplugged the product and reboot it everytime you want to use it is a reasonable response.
It hasn’t been recalled simply because it’s only a vocal minority experiencing these problems. The majority does not. I’m using 3 WDTVs on 2 networks regularly without any issues on firmware 2.01.86: no dropouts, reboots, lockups. So yes, I’d dare say something in your network is throwing off the WDTVs.
I was sent the "SMP "by mistake (another story) a couple of weeks ago (not the new Media Player model) so have spent some time getting to know it. My network (windows shares) contains 2 laptops, 2 desktops, a My Book LIve NAS, only the 2 desktops are wired to the router, all else including the WDTV Live are wireless.
I have media on one desktop and the NAS. I added windows shares to the WDTV media library which worked to start with but soon experienced dropped connections and on the odd occasion freezes and reboots. Rescanning of the media library didnt help but deleting it and rebuilding it did. That seemed to solve freezes and reboots but shares did get lost.
Digging round in this forum it seems windows shares are not the most robust. Apart from my NAS all devices on the system are in and out of standy or shut down. Often, when the desktop with my media came out of standby the WDTV couldn’t see the windows shares. I had to shut down fully the WDTV before it would reconnect.
I was suggested somewhere here to use Linux shares instead of windows. The My Book Live is a Linux box so natively had linux shares. On my windows desktop I installed hanewin NFS server. After dropping windows shares and using Linux shares my problems seem to have gone away. SMP is running well and a lot faster when accessing my media. So if you can try linux shares out, it may help you.
Thanks for the reply and it is much appreciated that you did. But! The only thing I ever changed on my original wdtv was doing the updates. Previously it was extraordinarily stable and I had not complaints. My network had remained the same. So it is obviously to do with the update.
I have tried numerous approaches to resolve the problem and the only solution so far is to hard reboot the thing. I have have attempted logging into network share, I’ve tried setting it up to read through the media server from the NAS. Everytime it looks like you’ve got it right and the next time you go to use it its not working. The other issue I previously had not stated was that half the time when you try to turn it on from standby it will not boot up. You have to disconnect the power and then try, that definately not a network issue.
So if you have any great ideas I’d be glad to hear them.
I have to occasionally reboot my Windows 7 pro boxes but never the one Windows 7 home 64 box that has some media
the box does not have gapless audio
the rewind and ff is very slow
the box downsamples high resolution lossless audio (24-292 and 24-96 audio flac files)
sometimes the performance can be slow as heck and the box must be restarted from the System Menu in setup
However that being said I put up with it because there is no better solution to handle the many different codecs to play my media (FLAC, Hi Res Audio, Mp3, DVD-ISO, AVI MKV, Mp4, TS files and Blu Ray image files) short of having a dedicated PC next to my TV or hi/fi with an HDMI/Coax/Toslink cable.
Should it be recalled? No. But it has its issues. And I believer the vocal minority is more like a silent majority. I know of many people who’ve given up on the box totally who are not on this forum
JRFishman wrote:
I know of many people who’ve given up on the box totally who are not on this forum
And I know of many people who enjoy their WDTVs without any issues who are not posting their positive experiences on this forum. So who’s anecdotal evidence is more significant statistically speaking?
I’m sure that there are many stories of people who have no issues with the box.
However, this is the only piece of hardware where I’ve experienced occasional networking issues. I use other platforms that use Samba shares to share network files. These include a tablet, a smartphone and a Linux Laptop and I’ve never had a connection problem on either platform.
Fortunately, my networking problems mostly have basically been solved though I’ve spoken to several sophisticated users who have tons of troubles with the boxes.
Anecdotal evidence or not, the box should be a bit easier out of the box to setup.
“…many people who enjoy their WDTVs without any issues…”
They are really happy. I envy them sincerely. Perhaps they have modest needs or they have nothing to compare, or, finally, they simply ignore the problems.
Also, people come here just to solve the problem, but not to tell how their device works well.
I’m gonna keep saying this as long as other people interprete their problems as material evidence of an inherently flawed device. Also, a few posts above, someone said 2.01.86 was the culprit, so I suggested to downgrade to 1.16.13. How’s that for solving the problem?
I’m gonna keep saying this as long as other people interprete their problems as material evidence of an inherently flawed device. Also, a few posts above, someone said 2.01.86 was the culprit, so I suggested to downgrade to 1.16.13. How’s that for solving the problem?
I’m still having minor network share issues with the box with 1.16.13. I reverted firmware about 10 months ago and have rare times where I get the invalid id/pw issues. Though the box is more stable and far more reliable reverting back to the old firmware.
