Hello, most of the peole I speak to in **bleep** Smith say the WTV Live does support Windows 7 WTV video, WD tech support won’t answer the question except to send me email sales pitches without actually answering the question.
Does anyone know for sure that this unit can play WIndows 7 WTV video format? Or else refer me to something that does?
Thank you.
The Live can’t play those files and neither can anything else (that container is so propriertary that MS doesn’t want you playing those files with anything else).
You CAN convert them to a format the Live will play:
Thanks Mike, but I’m getting too old and tired to constantly convert things (just got over another serious illness) and would love an automatic solution. I have a cheapie media player that I want to replace as converting files from wtv to dvrms and then to mpeg (as this cheapie box doesn’t support dvrms) means that I have the most horrible lag and desync on every converted film.
If anyone has any stories about how successfully lag free dvrms converted wtv files on this device are, I might have to start saving for the wdtv live box as the current system I use is killing me faster.
Hey, you can’t be older than me !
Seriously, I don’t think you’ll find any better solution than converting those files (of course, my choice would be not to use that program in the first place – I *hate* proprietary file formats). But if you want to post a (small) converted file I’d be glad to try it on the Live just to see if it plays properly.
Maybe not, I don’t know (evil grin). I am older than my eyebrows!!
I am using WIndows media Centre to record OTA DTV as it’s the easiest that I can think of. Have tried third party (I.e, not built into the O/S) but something always went wrong. Don’t have anything small as the smalles programs that I have are 1.2 gigabyte (half hour cooking show).
Do you have a suggestion of an EASY didigtal tv recorder software for windows 7 that records to dvrms and is as easy to use as the built in one?
I wish MS hadn’t changed the format, it makes life difficult.
Regards, seriously old and groady fart:):):)
Let’s put it this way – I’m retired (retarded, the grandkids would say) and feeling older every minute (this new tech can age you fast).
Um, you could just record five minutes or so (or perhaps I’ll try searching the web for a sample I can play with when I have the time – off to tennis right now :>). As for what to use instead of the Win Media Center (which is just plain evil) I’d have to know exactly what your requirements are. Are you looking to just watch network shows (the stuff you can see on Hulu, say)? TVersity does a lot of things and recorded shows MAY be one of them (this isn’t really my sort of country – I’m a TiVO guy for my television needs, and the WD Live is strictly for movie playback). And what are your ultimate goals here – just to watch once, or are you looking to edit/archive, or some other purpose?
Converting the files to dvrms isn’t bad. It isn’t like changing the codec or having to transcode. It is merely processing a few bits , actually discarding information the newer windows media center uses, and saving the file as dvrms.
On my pc it takes about 5 minutes to convert a one hour program.
You can get a program here that will do it automatically for you.
http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/08/automating-tasks-with-dvrmstoolboxs-filewatcher.html
Sorry for the very late reply mkelley, I had to get some software out the door (some user in the uk asking for updates again, never satisifed), recover from the flu, recover from the tablets helping me racover from the flu, then update my web site. Not necessarily in that order.
Ideally, I want to record all shows under windows 7 media centre as it just works, edit out the commercials (If it’s worth the bother) and send them to the tv in the lounge.
Using wifi won’t work, double brick house kills the sigal inside and out a lot. At the moment, I record everything, drop it onto a 320 gig usb drive, walk into the lounge, plug it into a cheap and horribly laggy Chinese made media box
What I can do is drop a long network cable out the window in a sheath from a spare 10/100 switch off the router and back into the lounge intot he back of the wd box.
What I still want to know is how does the WDTV live box go with dvr-ms files? Anyone found any lag and out of sync problems?
ptricks, thanks. I will do that.
Fangles wrote:
What I still want to know is how does the WDTV live box go with dvr-ms files? Anyone found any lag and out of sync problems?
I don’t play that file format, but if you could post a (small) example somewhere and link to it I’d be glad to try it here. My hunch is that directly wired you won’t have any issues but it’s best to test (unless you can buy it from a store with a good return policy).
You could also try posting this as a separate question (might get more attention that way). BTW, hope you’re feeling better.
Little bit better, still need a week to get over it all. I should be in bed but am coding as usual.
Installed dvrms-toolbox and set it up. Still cannot get it to convert wtv to dvr-ms, too tired to worry and understand it. Did add a profile to convert dvr-ms to mpeg and that works (manually convert wtv to dvr-ms first), they are detected and processed.
Thanks for your help.
WTV support is not possible, as it’s a closed format.
I’ve have been using MCE buddy. Freeware wtv to MP4 (or other) format converter. Runs in the background or on a scheduler and coverts windows media centre recorded TV simply to another destination folder and can wipe the original when finished.
Actually, it appears WTV is NOT a closed format. Microsoft provides information on accessing WTV content at the MSDN site:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc963726.aspx
While the information presented is focused on consuming WTV content in a Windows environment, it would appear that if the WD TV Live / Plus supports MPEG-2 video and MPEG-1 Layer II or Dolby Digital AC-3 audio it should be able to support the WTV format as well.
Please let me know if I am misinterpreting the information on that web site… But if not, does this change anything with respect to supporting WTV on the WD TV Live / Plus?
I’ve just been using Orb (orb.com) to view WTV files. It seems to be able to transcode them just fine.
WTV is the biggest thing that is keeping me from buying one of these. Calling it proprietary is not very relevant. The question is whether it is profitable to enter into an agreement with Microsoft in order to include this feature and increase sales, if that’s even necessary. Microsoft would be foolish to make it cost prohibitive for several reasons. First, they would make no money off it by doing so. Second, it’s unlikely that people will buy more copies of Windows 7 just because this product does not support WTV, and third, those who are putting off Windows 7 due to lack of compatibility with non 7 devices would have incentive to upgrade to Windows 7.
If you look at the code that shows how to process WTV files (see link in earlier post) is is not that difficult. However, the assumption is that you are running the code on a Windows 7 machine. It is NOT trivial to adapt it on a stand alone device. So if you think WD is overlooking something, they are not. An option would be for them to supply a PC component that must be running. That would help somewhat but would not let you play WTV files on a network share, just ones from a running PC.
Another even easier thing to do would be to write something that sends a message to a simple component running on a PC that initiates the server push (Play To) feature that WD already supports. It would be the equivalent of telling your daughter to go into the other room, find the recording, and click on Play To for you. I’d be able to write something like that in a matter of hours, assuming that I could write the code to run on a PC on my network. I don’t think it would be a big task for WD to do something similar, but I can’t speak for their marketing, legal, software development, or any other group within their company that would need to get involved.
Since conversion to DVR-MS is relatively simple, (incidentally that’s a proprietary format too, and WD supports it) I would leave it at that, but I have some questions first. Media Center is not just a media player but a management system. I use it to schedule recordings, figure out what to record, how long to keep things based on my preferences, remaining disk space, etc. In the past, I found that it’s easy to mess things up by tampering with files since MC no longer recognized the files as the ones it created. That was true even if I put them back exactly where I found them untouched. Perhaps that’s no longer an issue, or DVR-MS conversion in particular is an exception, but I’d like to hear from somebody who does this. If I tell Windows to keep the latest three recordings of the evening news, will it still continue to do that after the conversion?
This thread is bewildering… I had my WDTV Live HD box working through Cat5 wired Ethernet playing back WTS files that I had used MCE in the pre-release version of Windows 7 Ultimate to record. That was back in December thru March before the free version of Win7 expired. It just worked; WDTV Live box saw the digital TV programs that I had recorded from a USB dongle TV tuner and we watched on the TV attached to the WDTV box with HDMI cabling. The only complaint I had with this playback was that if I tried to fast-forward through commercials I couldn’t return to play mode. Had to restart the playback from the beginning - but I could live with that.
Now I’ve purchased Windows 7 Home Edition and have done a clean install on the same PC with the same USB TV tuner; only differences are the Windows 7 version AND the up-dated WDTV Live firmware. Now I’ve got problems:
- Thinking that the problem might be network throughput (running 100mb/sec) I copied all the media files to a 1TB WD Elements USB store and connected this directly to the WDTV Live box, and… the box does not recognise the WTS files, they don’t appear in the folder or on the All Video menu. From the PC I can see and playback the copied files on the USB drive attached to the WDTV Live box, so it seems that the copied files are not the problem.
My recollection of the initial setup was that it all just worked, without having to search for obscure setup options; or re-encoding the files to some codec/format/container than what Windows 7 MCE produces from the TV dongle.
The release notes for the WDTV Live firmware version 1.02.21 announces PlayTo support for Windows 7, but I can’t seem to make that work, either. Is there something in some PlayTo setup that I’ve not discovered that might be impeding the playback from the WDTV box, maybe?
Anyone with some suggestions or directions to any online resource that I haven’t found, yet?
That would be most appreciated.
Thanks,
Bill in Sydney, Australia
I would like to see the WTV format supported. I have similar issues to the previous post with freezing/no sound after 4-5 seconds. I tried converting my recorded TV files to dvr-ms, which does play but Media center does not “manage” the files after this, cleaning up old shows etc. Using this to view my recorded content on the television was the main reason for buying this product.
I can “play-to” the WTV files fine. It would seem if the wdtv box would ask the computer to transcode the files this would play fine. This seems to be a firmware issue which I would very much like to see resolved.
What do you want the WD to do? Play them from Network Shares? If so, it sounds like that’s not going to happen because the format is proprietary to microsoft.
The reason Play-To works is because Microsoft will transcode them.
Network Shares will NEVER (and SHOULDN’T) transcode.
Further to my earlier post: I suppose that I should add that I’m trying to play the WTS files from the Windows 7 PC in ‘Media Server’ mode on the WDTV Live, not from ‘network shares’ as none of the files present themselves on the WDTV in network shares mode.
If that means that W7 MCE is doing some transcoding of the served media then should I be looking for some setting in Windows 7 that controls the media services? The Play-To function is new to me so I’ll research that aspect of the system. If Play-To will get the recorded TV to play properly on the WDTV Live HD box , then I’ll be happy.
Thanks for the additioinal comments.
Bill in Sydney, Australia.
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