EDIT - 2012 - April 2
This message is replaced by moderator from the “ideas” section to this section.
As suggested by a mail I got from support to write my issues and suggestions at the “idea area”.
For a week or two I do have a WD TV Live Steaming Media Player and do get reboots, lockups, black screens etc.
Plus a strange exchange of actual playing movies when starting another movie (restart of the first one), + blotchy images.
I make use of a little external 2.5” hard drive connected with the front USB port of the WD TV Live box (+ powered by the USB connection). Movies in several formats, DVD, 1080p, avi-files etc. filed up at the external drive. For more fast access to movies I don’t make use of the actual database / library functions of the device (switched off by custom settings), but still the WD box do use some inventory of files.
Trying to figure out what is causing the problems I came to a work-flow how to get around with it.
I think, most of the troubles are caused by impatience behavior of our selves. The first minute(s) that a harddrive is connected (or PC by network), the device has to initialize the media files found at a harddrive. The green LED light of the device is blinking. By trying to get more fast access (before initializing is ended) “maybe” this initializing is becoming corrupt. At least afterwards I get these troubles. Seems the files that are written by the device to harddrive (or to the internal WD device ?) for starting and pause of movies are mixed up.
How to reset?
- First reset of the WD TV Live box itself.
Go to the setting menu ----> System ----> Restart of the WD TV Live box
Afterwards wait several minutes till the green LED light is not blinking anymore.
- Swich off power by the remote control
- Disconnect harddrive from TV Live box and connect harddrive to your Windows PC.
Do a search to files with extension *.bmk
(the first part is a string of many numbers and characters)
----> e.g. 4156d0011b76863ec1e7a7a60785790d.bmk
DELETE al the found *.bmk files
- There is a directory made “.wd_tv” ----> DELETE it.
Now that the harddrive is cleaned up, you can connect to the WD TV Live box again.
Start / power up WD TV Live and wait several minutes till the green LED light is not blinking anymore.
Afterwards you can choose your media files, and is working properly.
When disconnecting a harddrive from the WD TV Live box, see if the green LED light is not blinking,
and power off the WD TV Live box first.
When manually re-organizing your media files at your external hard-drive (change folder names, exchange movies etc.) when connected to a PC, the enclosed WD TV Live *.bmk files en “.wd_tv” folder could be faulty at a next start-up connected to WD TV Live box, as the references itself are not changed for this re-organization. So for proper working best to delete all WD TV Live box files when a certain re-organisation has to be done.
With this work-around I have not found errors yet. If I still get them I let you know.
My thought is that the firmware has to be changed to functions that are more clever, to avoid such problems, with a sort of test routines, that do a reset automatically when written index files by the WD TV Live box are corrupt in one way or another.
Hope this information is helpfully.
EDIT - 2012 - April 2 - Extra information that could be of help for troubleshooting.
Maybe the described problems above could be a combination with not 100% reliability of the used hard drive.
I had bought a new 2.5" portable hard drive a week later for connecting to TV Live, but I noticed it was not reliable. When re-organizing at a laptop, sometimes I could not delete files, I had reformatted the drive twice. Lastly when connected to the laptop it even stopped working several times when I was copying files from another drive to this portable hard drive. It went away from the list of connected drives. I had to unplug the cable and plug it in again to recognize again by PC. Another cable didn’t solve the problem. I have exchanged the faulty drive for another one.
Still my work around is as described above for the WD TV Live box
(deleting *.bmk files and “.wd_tv” folder when re-organizing files at the hard drive).
Still no errors found yet, all is working properly when using this work-around !!!
(And I can copy and delete files to the new drive without problems as well).
