wD TV Live

So near and yet so far.

ALMOST A PERFECT SET TOP BOX, BUT MISSING CRITICAL FEATURES.

WDTV Live

Pros:  Play any Video Media from a Windows Share

BBC IPlayer App embedded

Cons:  Strange Music and Photo Applications
Fails to support useful Video playlists (single files can be played).

So near and yet so far.

DLNA/SMB

The latest iteration of WD TV Live has announced support for DNLA, the bastard child of the completely failed PnP. I don’t mind this, but dropping support for SMB shares is unpardonable. Further the latest firmware (2.02.32) revision completely breaks the BBC IPlayer with respect being able to select a text list within the program categories. 2.02.32 BBC IPlayer within WD TV Live reduces the selection to a group of pictorial selections, possibly 1/20th of that which is possible with a simple text list. It is necessary to revert to 2.01.86 to retain access to text listing of programs.

Menu System – Filesystem Navigation

The two column menu system, with the ability to traverse 20 files with 2 key press’s is a huge improvement over the previous laborious of traversing a directory of files 1 by 1.

Support for the device is via the forums, which are sadly full of numerous requests for help where “arcane video format” does not work with “some combination of codec”. or “why doesn’t my USB cd drive work when plugged into USB port”  – Answer – because it doesnt – RTFM. I come to the conclusion the scale of the requests and the size of the forum are possibly used to deflect any rational request for features.

Video playlists

Example, in spite of numerous forum whingeing to the contrary, file playlists do work for video files. But the file is played from start to finish. The the next entry in the play list is played, etc.  There appears to be no mechanism to select a subset of a file. 🙁  See the xspf file under my section about the fine video player VLC. How I would love to have the xspf format implemented on WD-TV live.

Conclusion: – a great little player, marred by niggling omissions. When WD announced the next gen WD TV Live would not support SMB shares, I dashed out and bought another one, so I have spares with the existing (SMB) functionality.

Music and Photo Support.

Not really there. It is possible to guess (knowing the filesystem layout) to workout how to make stuff happen.
but no real support for playlists with 1400 entries on a layout of 40,000 mp3s. The only capability appears to be able to enter a directory and play/show a file.

Route to a killer product?

support for *.xspf playlists with play list or play random feature.

like to be able to delete useless apps (under services etc) or migrate them to an invisible space

Still like the WD-TV live, but could be better.

June 2014