Wife Friendly.....hmmmm

#1

Well firstly, great product. I can drop every PC i have running Winblows. I use Freenas as a server and serve my videos.

life is good. Everything works as advertised by playing all the media files and network access etc.

I have one simple request. WD TV Live just needs to Wife Friendly and especially as my main focus is video.

All i want is for the Thumbnail issue to be resolved and judging by the numerous other mentions of these issues so do a lot of other users.

By that i mean i have a very common directory structure for videos.

/Videos

 Anastasia

 American Ganster

etc etc…

In those directories are my vob files.

In those directories is a file named folder.jpg that i have to have to have a thumbnail of the folder.

Please for the love of god (and a happy wife) when i press play on the remote i really want the vobs to start playing from that

folder view. I dont want to have to enter into the directory and select a vob. I mean its ok for me (computer savvy dude) to do

it but it makes it too hard for my better half who does not know what a VOB is. The fact that their is a pause between vobs when doing this is ok. We can live with that.

Right now the folder.jpg is displayed if i press play on the folder and that is really not intuative.

Anyway any response from a WD tech would be really appreciated.

thanks

Matt

#2

If you press ‘play’ on the folder instead of ‘OK’, it plays the VOB in order with minor swirchover pause between VOB. This is the way it works for me.

#3

Yes, but not if you have a folder.jpg in the directory. It just displays the folder.jpg.

thanks

Matt

#4

I should also mention that im using a Network share if it wasnt already obvious. I was using DLNA with the Freenas server but currently there’s no support for thumbnails that way.

thanks

Matt

#5

Yes, you are right. I like thumbnails and do not want WDTV Live messing up. I found a workaround. I use Wild Media Server - DLNA complied, works perfectly with WDTV Live with exclusive profile for it. I use folder view. In Wild media server, you have option to link a thumbnail to a folder by ‘edit title’ option. Try, your wife will like it.

#6

Yes, but if im correct Wild needs Winblows. Freenas does not and its supposed to be DLNA compliant.

Its also a known fact from WD techs that they dont support thumbnails with DLNA and NFS shares are crippled with this

problem i have mentioned.

Do the WD techs watch this forum ?

#7

I don’t know if you have full rips of your DVD’s, but if you don’t or you only intend to play them on the WDTV live, which doesn’t support menus anyway, you could rerip the DVDs -even from the HDD- and store only the main titles in ISO files. That will create less file clutter, and easier to navigate as well (no need for a subfolder per movie), and it takes less than a couple minutes per movie with a program like IMGburn or DVDshrink.

#8

mattyjon70 wrote:

Yes, but if im correct Wild needs Winblows. Freenas does not and its supposed to be DLNA compliant.

Its also a known fact from WD techs that they dont support thumbnails with DLNA and NFS shares are crippled with this

problem i have mentioned.

Do the WD techs watch this forum ?

 

 

Yes, the WMS needs PC running windows. I have WD Sharespace NAS and it is DLNA compliant and comes with built in Twonky Media Server. Still no use. I had to use WMS, keeping PC on always.

#9

The lack of comment in regard to teh thumbnail issue from WD is deafening.

Do they plan to deal with it one day or not?

If not then this device will be short lived.

#10

I dont mind the no-menu support. But to re-rip everything is a major effort. I have lots of DVD’s that are ripped. Some of these are classics so it makes sense to keep the original vobs and use those. I could have originally ripped them as iso’s but i didnt.

I mean i write software for a living for Winblows and im absolutelly sure its a very minimal task to fix the thumbnail issue so is surely considered a minor thing to do for the WD techs.

By the time i re-rip or compress them all into mp4’s or whatever(and lose quality as i have a full HD plasma) a young dude with glasses and pens in his pocket could fix this very easily. Im surprised the guy who has hacked WD TV for use with webservers and all the other stuff hasnt just done it as well. It would be a reason for me to go to the dark side of custom firmware.

#11

This maybe a solution for media on a networked (possibly with Freenas) drive for use with thumbnails.

Anyone tried it ?

…

Anyone who is having network issues should really install b-rad’s hacked firmware and use xmount. I like many have been batteling with wdtv live network share dropout problem and I tried everything imaginable to get it to work, yet it simply wouldn’t. So what I did was I downloaded b-rad custom firmware version 1.07 and installed it. To get this to work you will need to constantly have a usb stick plugged in but at least this works, until WD fixes the issues. Actually this works even better then the network shares that are build in.

  1. Download B-rads latest firmware
  2. Flash the firmware into the player
  3. Take a small sized usb key (I have a bunch of dell 512mb ones, but you can use the smallest available and will still work) and copy the net.mounts file to the USB key, it is found with the firmware package you download.
  4. Open the net.mounts file and modify it to have the proper information for your CIFS shares (or NFS shares, instructions are included as comments in the net.mounts file)
    For me, this is how my net.mounts file looks
    xmount //192.168.0.185/All_Media Media cifs user=wdtvlive,pass=mypassword (can ommit user and password entries if using annon)
  5. Place the USB key into the WDTV live and power it on. Once it is powered on and the usb light is solid on the front, navigate to Videos/Local Drives/USB2 (or 1) and open it.
  6. If you got the right syntax in your net.mounts folder, all of your files will appear as it they were on the actual usb thumbdrive! (on first boot sometimes it takes about 30 seconds for the drives to appear as there is a sleep value set on xmount to ensure it establishes a connection). From here on you can browse all of your network media as if it was local to the small sized usb drive you have plugged in! The benefits of this vs a network share (which has all the dropout problems) is that, for one, NO Dropouts!! I watched like 3 movies since and works perfect, and benefit number 2 is that unlike network shares, thumbnails work just as if they were local to the usb key, so if you named your thumbnails exact same as the movie name, the actual movie file will carry the thumbnail without the extra thumbnail file being visible! So simply name your thumbnails same as the movie and the thumbnail will appear for the folder view, and once again as the image of the MKV file! If you want to have a thumbnail for a general category like Movies, you can also place a file called folder.jpg into the movies directory and that thumbnail will become your folder icon, without the actual jpg file being visible in the tree.

Hope this helps someone, was super easy to setup and it worked for me right away! Hope this helps you guys out until wd releases proper firmware to fix the issues, but even if they do I wouldn’t go back to using the network shares option since the thumbnails do not work as well as they do on local disks