It’s 2010 and the WDTV Live has to be the last device to be interoduced with out gigabit support. Why would anybody introduce a streaming media player hobbled with 100mb?
sholling wrote:
It’s 2010 and the WDTV Live has to be the last device to be interoduced with out gigabit support. Why would anybody introduce a streaming media player hobbled with 100mb?
What are the devices introduced with a full *working* Gb support ?.
What is the purpose of having a Gb network card on a device that has no internal HD by default and knowing that the max bitrate of a bluray is 54mb/s according to BR specifications ?.
Ethernet tends to be roughly 60% efficient. In other words 100mb Ethernet is good for maybe 60mb/s in the real world. But that aside in my testing so far I have yet to be able to get BD to play stutter free on my WDTV Live via Ethernet. It plays fine from an external drive but not via Ethernet. Gigabit would give a bit more breathing room and in addition would make it easier to use the network to sync/update files stored locally on an external drive. Come on it’s 2010 and what would the cost increase be to go gigabit? 50 cents? It would be worth it and give a feature boost over the competition.
I have a DLINK DWA-140 802.11 N wireless USB device on the way and I’m going to see if that removes the bottleneck. I would have liked to go with a 5ghz but none were on the approved list.
BTW this issue aside I love the product. The user interface and feature set are very well thought out. I was surprised to see that it does not do multichannel sound over HDMI (stereo only per the manual) but I don’t mind running an optical cable to my receiver. Anyway I was all set to order a second WDTV Live but for now I think I’ll hold off for a bit and see how the one I have does with the DWA-140.
Hello,
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=&chart=11
100mb /8 = 12.5MB/s, take the first one in the list and you are at 85%. 
Some other players are reported to play BR with no issue and have as well a 100mb network card and probably using NFS instead of Samba.
I think that there IS an issue in the WDTV Live with samba that prevent playing big files using network shares (samba).
For example I can play with no issue a fixed bitrate 70mb/s file using DLNA (media server) but cannot play any file with bit rates upper than 50mb/s using samba. 
I agree that Gb will perhaps give more room , but the basic problem to me is not the network card speed but how WD is dealing with it while playing media (samba is slow, NFS does not exist at all).
I say “while playing media” because some have reported 9.5MB/s so 76mb/s transfert rates copying files from a PC to an usb drive attached to the WD. Not tested myself.
I’m using a NAS (DLNA/Samba) so was happy to see a device with no hard drive as I don’t need it (all gb home network, 2010 compliant :))
From what I know only a few devices use Gb cards (Dune, C200, A200, BD-1) but on none of them it is working the way it should (Sigma bug or something like that).
I don’t know what you mean with “Ethernet tends to be roughly 60% efficient”. It’s a liitle far from truth. It’s preaty easy to fill 100mbps. With small B, take care!
That 60% it’s more likely to be on wlans, but on ethernet, with a correct switch (most today switches), it’s not a problem.
WDTV Live doesn’t have the necesary buffers (memory) or cpu to get to 100mbps. And it’s not a must, since no media will require full 100mbps.
It is a mistake from WD to publish WD World Edition with a 1gpbs adapter since the box doesn’t do more that 15-20mbps.
Ok, it’s a marketing issue, but not a real problem.
Well it looks like it’s more than a Ethernet issue. I tried a DWA-140 USB 802.11N adapter pulling from a fast network share and no joy. The WDTV Live will play it fine from an external USB drive but not from a nework share or a DLNA server.
I’ll keep it for a music player and for DVD rips while I search for a better solution. It may be a firmware upgrade or something not on the market yet but long term it’s not what I would call a workable solution. Maybe WD will come out with a 2.0 version with sufficient memory and processing power. I like WD products and have 2x WD 500GB Black and 4x 1TB Black drives (RAID1 and RAID5 sets) in my main PC, a WD notebook drive in my laptop, and 4x WD 1.5TB Green drives in my home media server so I’m far from a WD basher. 
Hello,
Can you download http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6N9PQOUK
and try the 70mb/s file from dlna (media server) or samba (network share)
I can play the 70mb/s file from my NAS (synology) using the NAS DLNA server, I cannot play it correctly using samba on the same NAS . All is wired, but it could be that I’ve an issue with one cat5e cable that is in the network.
You can try as well :
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AAGQBH61
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9Z9J893Y
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=35SYKH5H
Using Samba, the 50mb/s one is played with no issue, for the 55 it is from time to time (buffer ?) so I consider that the samba limit for the WDTV live is between 50 and 55 reading media. So samba should be an issue for BR depending of their bitrate and how long (buffer) the max bitrate is in a scene (not sure to be clear, bad english, hope you see what I mean)
I’ve as well tried the famous bird scene and it doesn’t play correctly wherever I use samba or DLNA.
