Play To is not all that difficult once things are set up properly. Assuming the WD TV works as designed, it’s just a matter of moving things to the Play List in Windows Media Player. Once there are items on the list, which is on the right side of the WMP window, there is a small icon above the list that looks a bit like a server, and is easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. If you mouse over it, it will say Play To, and if you click on it, it will list devices that can be Played To.
It’s not a difficult thing to do once it works, although I haven’t personally tried it with WD TV. The only problem I have is that although it seems like a great idea to me to be able to play my music to another device such as a stereo system in another room, or on larger speakers instead of my iThing, I can’t say I feel the same way about video. If I’m in the bedroom and want to watch TV, I don’t want to go to the family room and stop whoever is doing something in hat room so I can find a program to watch, Play [it] To the device in my bedroom, go back there, and hope I end up with the right program. Play From makes more sense to me, but that won’t work with a passive file server and a proprietary format that cannot be decoded remotely.
WTV and DVR-MS are both proprietary formats. That’s not the issue. The whole idea behind a MC extender was supposed to be to play these sorts of things on a box similar in concept to the WD TV. If an XBOX console can do it, and the general idea was supposed to be to have things on the market that can play Media Center content remotely, then why pretend it’s not supposed to work?
Lyleman - Thanks for the “play-to” tip… I wasn’t aware of that “push” feature within Win7. That will suffice for now until WD provides firmware that actually plays “.wtv”.
Just wondering if you ever found a solution to the problem you described? The reason why I ask this is because the exact same problem is happening to me.
Im using Windows 7 Home Premium which records TV using the WTV file format. I understand that the WD TV Live does not natively suppport WTV files (i.e. it could not play these files if you plug a USB stick into the unit) but it does seem to allow these files to be streamed from a Media Server (in this case my Windows 7 box running media centre).
For a week or so, media streaming seemed to be ok but I experienced a drop-out in my network once whilst I was playing some recorded media which seemed to cause an issue with the WD unit where it seemed to freeze for a short time. Anyway, after I rebooted the unit, I noticed that when I tried to play a WTV file off the Media Server it would say that it was an unrecognised file format. I rebooted again and was asked if I wanted to download the latest firmware (which I thought I had already done before). It then occured to me that maybe the network spike caused the unit to be reset to its original firmare meaning that the support for WTV files was lost. The firmware update did resolve this issue but then I started getting the exact same issue as you.
Calling it lag is an understatement. When streaming from the Windows 7 box to the WD HD Live, it look fine for about 3 seconds and then all of a sudden I would lose sound and the video would start crawling.
Im like you. I really dont know what has happened but I thinking it must be a firmware thing. Its seems the latest firmware causes the intense lag whilst too old a firmware will cause loss of WTV file support.
If you found a solution, I would really appreciate your feedback.
Hey Bill, just a quick thought. Is it possible that the Windows 7 Beta version was still using the DVRMS format that WD does support? Maybe the WTV files only came into use with the final release. If so that could have been an explanation for your scenario but Im still thinking its more a WD firmware issue.
how hard is it to right-click the file and choose convert to dvr-ms? it’s built into windows! no need to download anything.
i record a of stuff with windows media center, then edit out the commercials in a video editor (the automatic stuff like comskip are terrible in my opinion). then use handbrake to encode them to mkv format.
It’s been a few weeks since I last checked this thread, hence my delay in replying to posts specifically addressed to me; sorry about that.
Basically I discovered three workarounds to the primary issue of the WDTV unit not supporting the playback of .wtv files produced by Win7 media center. Initially I found a conversion application called MCEBuddy that runs in the background and can be configured to run overnight to convert new .wts files in the RecordedTV folder into .mp4 files in a folder of your choice ( I chose a folder in the Public Shared folder ). The WDTV Live HD unit can play these when it can see the shared folders. Sometimes the shared folders appear and sometimes they don’t appear. The conversion process can take over an hour with MCEBuddy as it is designed to work in the background and not consume all the CPU power available.
From posts after mine in this thread I learned of the PlayTo function in Win7. That works for me, but as it is controled from the PC I don’t seem to be able to control the playback (Pause, FForward, etc) from the WDTV remote.
Then I discovered the Win7 converter in the right-click menu when selecting the MCE produced .wts files in the RecordedTV folder. This has been mentioned more recently in this thread in a question “how hard is it to right-click the file and choose convert to dvr-ms?” Well it’s not too hard once you know that this function exists… And this solution takes only a few minutes maximum to convert a 4 or 5GB .wts file. Maybe someone reading this has scripting talent and can share with us a means of automating the process like MCEBuddy does with a quicker result.
Thank you to the guys who posted the PlayTo and Convert To ,dmr-ms workarounds. Now I need to get WiFi working as my WDTV unit is getting relegated to the bedroom TV where I don’t have Cat-5 ethernet cabling. I bought a new SONY Blu-Ray player for about AU$210 that includes SONY Internet Television. This does most things that the WDTV unit does, plus iView for Australian ABC and SBS episode catchup (and, of course, Blu-Ray playback…). Since regions outside the USA can’t access the content that the WDTV Live Plus offers we have to seek products from other vendors to match the capabilities. If WD were to add the iView functions we wouldn’t need to do that… And, I should add, the SONY player can playback .wtv files from Win7 MCE without converting them to .dmr-ms format.
“how hard is it to right-click the file and choose convert to dvr-ms?”
Very. It’s almost tantamount to rewriting all of media center recording and management. First of all, if I want to watch something on my HTPC, I don’t need WDTV. There’s nothing to convert. If I want to watch from a different device such as a bedroom TV with WDTV hooked up to it, I obviously can’t just right click because I’m not at the HTPC.
Since my initial threads, I noticed that my PS3, which does not claim to support WTV, plays WTV files using DLNA. If it’s Windows that’s doing the conversion, then WDTV should play them just as well, which would make this a moot point. Except the quality of the streamed program is lousy on the PS3. If Windows is doing the transcoding, then it’s Microsoft that’s doing an awful job. I have no ax to grind against any company and am merely looking to find a solution that works for me. If WDTV fails to meet the bill because of WD, or if it fails because of Microsoft, neither gets me any closer.
Converting in an automated fashion is not an option either. Converting to dvr-ms is one of the first things I thought of and would not have bothered posting if it were that simple. I could easily write a program to monitor files and automatically convert them to DVR-MS. If Windows treated the copy the way it treated the original, then I’d be using a WDTV now.
The whole point of the media center recording system is to automate things. Users can schedule recordings, tell it to keep the latest x espisodes, delete particular ones after watching, etc. It’s not just about recording but about managing. Once a WTV is converted to dvr-ms, Windows Media Center no longer manages it. Management is very complex and takes into account new vs rerun, keep while space is there vs keeping the latest episodes, recording a rerun if the episode failed to record when new, and when you add in a family of five who all care about their own programs, it’s not simply a matter of me erasing things after I watch them. I don’t want to have a clue what’s what. Media Center can go by rules, use them flexibly depending on overall space, try to keep things longer if they haven’t been watched…
What it can’t do is create things in a compatible format that the rest of the world currently uses.
What a shame there still isn’t native WTV playback. The Live is currently $99 at HN. Only a couple of months ago it was literally twice the price. Perhaps going back to an XB 360 just for extender purposes is the best way to go.
I own the WD TV Live player for more than a year being quite happy with it. Also I have upgraded from Vista to Windows 7, also implementing digital tuners in the computer.
The Windows 7 format, leaves me with no opton than hoping for a solution from a future firmware upgrade or in pain to have to choose for an other unit.
The right-click and convert method should work. But it doesn’t work for me. This has something to do with the fact that the WTV files are recorded in H.264 format (by a device called HD-PVR from Hauppauge). In order to convert it to wmv format, I have to transcode it and this is a lengthy process.
Luckily, Microsoft has a sample program that comes with a SDK of their free Encode Express Edition. And I can use their free Visual Studio Express Edition to customize the sample program to fully automate the transcoding process, and move the WTV file and the converted WMV file to a shared folder. The WMV files can be viewed by some old Win-XP PCs(and WD TV Live should work too). The WTV files can be viewed by other Win-7 PCs.
The automated process is still lengthy. But at least I don’t need to manually do this; therefore, I don’t really care. There is a bug in the decoder; in some occasion, the audio of the video is completely missing. But this rarely happens, and I can always re-transcode the same WTV file.
If anyone wants the source code, I can email to him. But you need to know how to download the free softwares from Microsoft web site, and know how to configure the softwares, compile and build the program. Sorry, this is not a good idea to email executable files or scripts.
The quality of the stream over DLNA depends on the end-product manufacturer’s support, as viewed by the DLNA certificate (you can look up the DLNA certificate). For example, a Sony BD player doesn’t allow HD playback over DLNA. It only allows SD playback which is through ugly transcoding. I suspect the PS3 is doing transcoding of the material to SD. It’s up to the gatekeeper to decide what is allowed. The WTV is merely the message. The gatekeeper decides what goes through so you can’t blame MS for this. You can blame MS for not providing better WTV support and if MS is going to push a new container, it should push manufacturers to support it.
It’s not true that Windows Media Center doesn’t manage dvr-ms files. I also have Windows Media Center for Windows 7 and when I convert a WTV file to dvr-ms, I then see 2 copies of the recorded show inside of WMC. But the WD TV only sees the dvr-ms file. Yes, it’s not a great system and it needs to be improved. I have a fast quad-core system so it’s only takes a few seconds to right-click all the recordings and start the conversion process. Walk away and forget about it. Then when I want to play it, I can play it on the WD TV or on the 360 or on the PC or whatever.
Support for WTV is going to take time. I love using VideoReDo to edit my dvr-ms files. It drove me mad that it didn’t support WTV files but the latest version does support WTV and h.264 which makes it a pleasure to edit video files.
There is a few things to add. Recording can take place as H264 (about 7Gb per hour) or mpeg (about 1 Gb per hour), The first is from a digital signal, in my case a Anysee E30TC - Plus DVB-C/T USB Tuner, which deliveres output in HD quality that cannot be converted to dvr-ms. Output from a analog tv card deliveres output in Mpeg4 format which indeed can be converted to dvr-ms.
The WD TV Live will play H264 formats. The container from Microsoft with the extentions .WTV will not be played. What is possible, is to send a stream to the WD player from W7 media center but then, as you state as well, the quality is severely degraded…
Best solution is to include the .WTV format in the WD TV Live player, which I am still hoping for.
Best solution is to include the .WTV format in the WD TV Live player, which I am still hoping for.
Originally posted by Guy_K:
WTV support is not possible, as it’s a closed format.
*> Microsoft won’t allow ANYONE else to access the WTV format.> It doesn’t matter how many times people ask for it. It’s something WD can physically not do.
Well, that was the last we’d heard from WD about it.
Don’t forget, the same thing happened with .asf (and .wmv). A few companies, like Nero, paid for .asf licensing, which was all and good, but many other companies just added .asf support without any licence, and Microsoft started suing them left, right, and center, and made them all take it back out. There used to be a high demand for the “old” version of VirtualDub (1.4) once Microsoft made them remove .asf support from 1.5.
So, just because VideoReDo has added WTV support, doesn’t automatically mean that WD can legally support it.
The last we heard from WD was that Microsoft won’t issue any licensing… I can’t find anything that shows Microsoft has changed their minds, and I can’t see WD doing anything that could end up getting them sued by Microsoft.
Ya know ! The fickleness of the wdtv live software is beyond me. I’m running w7 and trying to use playon. Playon will work from w7 on my ipod touch as well as my sony blueray player. No muss no fuss. and the wdtv live no luck. Is it back to the end of december thing ?
