WD TV Live (ie WD TV 2)

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Probably it would come without duty, but then if they charge duty you need to have someone pay that money to the courier guy. I did not want to bother.

Thanks,
Sharad
 
i have a lg 42" plasma. I have been watching movies off my laptop using the VGA connection. my laptop has no HDMI output. the movies look just ok. i wasnt blown away by the HD quality. Maybe HDMI would make it better i dont know.

to test hdmi, i converted a short clip from h.264 to WMV HD to play on my xbox 360 to play through the HDMI cable and the picture quality was much sharper, detailed, vivid and bright.

thus i decided to order the wd hd live player after reading a few reviews as that was my only option without buying a new laptop with HDMI.

my question is will hdmi from wd hd live give a better picture than running a similar file from a laptop using vga. i know one is analog and one is digital and in theory the digital should have no signal loss. but many have reported that they see no difference in vga and hdmi quality

anyone who has a wd hd player noticed a difference in quality if they have played the same movie from a laptop using vga?
 
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smedhavi said:
Hi,

I purchased the WD TV Live from 20North for 8.1K (including duty and shipping). Good service from 20North! Delivered in 2 weeks. Shipped through Bluedart with good packaging.

The product itself is great. I already have WD TV HD. The new version is surely better. It is faster, my wife thinks the picture is better (may be because of deep color support), and the wireless feature rocks. I attached a wireless N USB dong, and it was easy to setup the network. I could immediately see the shares from my media server. I can also see the USB hard disk attached to WD TV Live mapped as a drive on my server. So I can copy stuff directly to that disk over the LAN! Youtube and the two internet radio stations already setup on the player, work as expected. I am not too much into low quality audio and video, so I did not bother to figure out if you can play from other websites too or not. Audio and pictures stream well from the server, but the video streaming is flaky. I think that could be because I do not have a wireless N router.

Uncompressed AVI (my home video) does not play as smoothly as H.264 video. So I would need to convert to H.264 as I did for WD TV HD.

Overall a good product. Highly recommended.

Thanks,
Sharad
Click to expand...

That is ok, Why I'm asking is since many wd live units bricked on 1.01.12 version upgrade and they they were returned to WD. They may reflash the unit with older vesion and sell it again. I want to make sure it is not like that. To confirm that I am asking people who recently received new wd tv live.
 
finally got my wd hd live.

ordered on 16 jan though 20 north. delivered on 25th Jan.
plugged it in through HDMI and ethernet cable and it found the network right away. tried playing my hd 720 rips but the video started stuttering. the network connection would keep dropping. anyone else has faced this issue?

my pc which has all my movies has vista. the ethernet connection is stable as used to connect my laptop to it to see movies as some were too large to see over a wifi network

i dont know why the network connection on wd hd live keeps dropping. any suggestions guys?

i have received a unit with firmware 1.01.00. it keeps prompting me to upgrade to 1.01.17. should i do it? will that take care of the network problem?
 
Hi Guys,

The status of my WD TV Live from amazon thro vpost has been given as Handover to airline. Srinisundar assures me that it may get to chennai in one or two days.Then i have to deal with the customs.

cheers,
sri
 
my take on the wd hd live

the good part:

1.The setup was easy.
2.it detected the lan shares right away.
3.picture quality is very good.

now the bad part:

even though it connects to the network instantly.. the network kept getting disconnected every 5 minutes. i couldnt understand why it was happening. i had connected it to a ethernet cable from my router. which work fines on my laptop. no answer for this on the wd manual. so i started searching the net reading forums and after 2 days of research i find out that some people have had success with network stability by renaming their workgroup as "workgroup". mine was "MSHOME". and it worked.

though the network is now stable.. i still cant play movies smoothly over the network from my pc. the files stutter every 10 min. while playing the movie, the video would freeze as if was buffering and then suddenly it would fast forward through till the current audio trying to catch up. the files play fine if i use a flash drive and plug it directly into the wd player. i happened with all formats mkv, mp4, divx

which defeats the whole purpose of "LIVE" of the wd hd live.

i even upgraded the firmware from 1.01.00 to 1.01.17 thinking maybe that will take care of the network problem but it didnt.

to be honest i am a bit dissapointed in the product. devices like these dedicated media players are supposed to be easy to use plug and play so that regular folk can use them. i have been a program writer and a SAN specialist in the past. it has been annoying for me to figure out the problems.

only if my laptop had a HDMI port i would never have spent money on this thing.

if you want this maybe get the wd player without live and save money.
 
anshu22 said:
though the network is now stable.. i still cant play movies smoothly over the network from my pc. the files stutter every 10 min. while playing the movie, the video would freeze as if was buffering and then suddenly it would fast forward through till the current audio trying to catch up. the files play fine if i use a flash drive and plug it directly into the wd player. i happened with all formats mkv, mp4, divx
Click to expand...

Hello anshu,

Were you playing movie with high bit-rate (HD), or were they SD resolution movies?
 
Hi Guys,

My WD TV Live is with the Chennai customs. Hope it will get delivered this week.Purchased a 1 TB external Seagate HDD today.

Please suggest a good Optical card and an HDMI card for the WD.It does not have a Coaxial out.So have to get an Optical.

cheers,
sri
 
Hi Fellow Members,

Got a chance to test the WDTV HD Live, got it from a friend on mine. He got it from the US for 6.8K (christmas offer). There are already a lot of reviews from various owners, so here's mine adding to their list..... (it's a same type of test which I did for my PlayOn HD)

I personaly tested these following formats of video/audio,

.avi (played comfortably)
.mkv (played comfortably, no jerks even with a 16Gb single file, perfect 5.1 DTS audio)
.ts (played comfortably, even sequential files...... with a delay of 1sec between each files, time lag improved from previous versions)
.m2ts(------------------------------DO----------------------------------)
.vob (-------------------------DO----------------------------------------)
.mp4 (played comfortably)
.mpg (played comfortably)
.mov (played comfortably)
.dat (played comfortably)
.rm (played comfortably)
.dts(played comfortably)
.rmvb(played comfortably)
.mp3 (played comfortably)
.wav (played comfortably)
.flac(played comfortably, even flac audio from .wav files)
.wma (played comfortably)
and all possible image formats upto 4K size tested ok.

I did not try ISO and ASF files.

subtitles (internal and external, i.e .str) were displayed very clearly.

The file's which did not play are .wv, and .evo

The GUI is good(same as old WDTV), remote operation has improved compared to it's older version.

The problem of playing .vob files from inside of the Video_ts folder has been solved. But maintaining the particular audio track when switching between 2 files is yet to be solved.

No DTS-HD-MA bitstream. The player downmixes it to DTS5.1 Surround. DD-True-HD bitstream is supported and the AVR also displays the same. Refer the image below.
For DD-True-HD I tested the movie I'm Legend and a music video from Dave Mathew
85264223.jpg

49626264.jpg


And this is the message displayed on my AVR
64277056.jpg



The ethernet port is doing a descent job for browsing youtube movies, a HD clip from youtube played with a little bit of jerks (managable). Streaming media from PC/NAS is a little jerky as already pointed out by many users.

PQ/SQ is similar to PlayOn/Xtreamer.

Portability wise, this is really a good device.
98468047.jpg



cheers.
 
I have ordered the WDTV2 (without Live) which supports DTS downmixing.
Saved $20 looking at the comments on poor N/W playback by live.
 
Hi Guys,

Got my WD TV Live today. PQ is excellent. But not able to get any sound thro optical to my AVR. My AVR has got 2 optical in connections. I have tried both. Both Dolby and DTS are not playing. Not a sound.:sad: What am i doing wrong? Any ideas?

sri
 
I am using my xps 1530 powered by a low end nvidia 8600 gts to play my hd rips using mpc-hc through a HDMi connected to my avr, does a WDTV live offer significant improvement in pq compared to this setup? any one with similar setup
tried comparing the same..
 
srikarkav said:
Hi Guys,

Got my WD TV Live today. PQ is excellent. But not able to get any sound thro optical to my AVR. My AVR has got 2 optical in connections. I have tried both. Both Dolby and DTS are not playing. Not a sound.:sad: What am i doing wrong? Any ideas?

sri
Click to expand...

First, Did you try connecting your wdtv to avr using composite a/v cable. If that works fine, then I guess something wrong with the audio settings on ur avr.

Secondly, Did you also try changing the right audio-in on your avr? like optical-in in your case.
If you have selected the right audio-in, then something wrong with the cable, probably.
 
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