Thinking of buying a WD TV Live

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dafman

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#1072922 23-Jun-2014 21:08

mattwnz: I had an older version of a WD media player, and had to return it as it wouldn't fast forward videos properly. Instead it jump all over the place. Also the interface was laggy. Not sure if the Live version is any better, but I would buy from somewhere where you can try it out first to test it, and return it if you need to.

I'm on my second wdtv. I've got current and previous model. No probs with either.

On occasions video slightly stutters, but by swapping the video set up (easily done) fixes this. Auto mode works fine with most files, however sometimes I need to manually swap into 60htz for American origin files and 50htz for English origin files.

rb99

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#1072939 23-Jun-2014 21:24

Glassboy:
rb99: Thanks for all the replies and the useful information.

Playing back DVD rips does seem to be a bit of a problem. Googling this stuff gives all sorts of answers, though this one http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Live-Plus/quot-Autoplay-quot-folders-that-contain-Video-TS-VOB-files/td-p/204588 was quite interesting, in that it appears that you can drill down and play individual DVD vobs, but you can't just play the actual DVD 'folder'.

So when I needed to solve the problem of what to do with some DVDs created by my children's school to ensure we had continued access to the content I turned to Handbrake to encode them as MP4s. It will also do MKV. It's a very painless way for dealing DVD rips of family movies et al.

I'm currently thinking about reimaging my NAS with OpenMediaVault and putting Plex on it, as it would vastly simply the whole process of watching home movies.

Its a good idea but I must admit I'm kind of hoping to avoid learning to use handbrake and/or turning them into MP4s/MKVs. I would have about 300 movies to do which is a bit much unless Handbrake (or DVDfab which I used originally) have some kind of batch conversion thing.

Also a proper NAS would just be to expensive for us at the moment.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

rb99

Glassboy

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#1072943 23-Jun-2014 21:36

rb99:

Its a good idea but I must admit I'm kind of hoping to avoid learning to use handbrake and/or turning them into MP4s/MKVs. I would have about 300 movies to do which is a bit much unless Handbrake (or DVDfab which I used originally) have some kind of batch conversion thing.

Handbrake is very simple to use. The out of the box profiles are good. You choose your source, choose your profile and add to the queue. Hit go and it's away.

If you have a machine that you can dedicate to the task, you can create a custom profile that does a much slower and deeper conversation, for example removing overscan, and just leave it chugging away. I imagine if you did that to 300 movies you'd save a whole heap of space.

rb99

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#1072945 23-Jun-2014 21:40

dafman: I have the latest WDTV live. It plays ripped DVDs flawlessly. I rip using DVD shrink. On the wdtv, I select the top level vob_0 and the wdtv takes me directly to the DVD top menu. From there, its performs just like a DVD. Perfect.

I used DVDfab to rip the DVD's. Am sure its easy enough to run the vob_0 file, would just prefer not to have to explain to the midgets and my wife about having to find a vob_0 file to play, say, The Avengers or Brave or whatever.

I also have Mezzmo for streaming, which will happily send ripped DVD's to the TV at the moment. So I'm hoping if I can get Mezzmo to stream to the WD TV and then from there to the physical TV I'll be able to use the WD TV's menus on the TV with Mezzmo allowing me to select a nice DVD folder/DVD cover. But that's probably wishful thinking and I'd need to have the PC on to run Mezzmo instead of connecting the DVD rips external HDD to the WD TV.

Don't think that's very clear, but anyway......

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

rb99

JimmyH

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#1073013 23-Jun-2014 23:26

Vidcoder is a front end that uses the Handbrake engine, and can do batch encodes. You can queue up what you want done, and let is run overnight etc. That's what I do.

As for the WDTV units, I have two (a Live Hub, and an older model Live). They both work well, off both local hard drives and networked to the DLNA server on my NAS. The range of file types they are compatible with is wide, but not totally exhaustive. So far, they have proved stable and reliable, and I'm not sorry I acquired both of them.

rb99

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#1073751 24-Jun-2014 21:57

Seeing as I have Mezzmo anyway, I asked on the Mezzmo forum and they say it is possible to rename (or label) the first vob file of a ripped DVD to a more user friendly name, which would certainly help. If that works fine I could leave any recoding to MKVs or ISOs to a later date. Seeing as the WD TV is on sale till 1st July I reckon I've got a good week of prevarication and indecision ahead of me......

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

rb99

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afe66

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#1073962 25-Jun-2014 09:46

I just rip my DVDs with handbrake with High profile after adding the commentary tracks and leave them on my NAS where space isn't an issue. Most movies end up 1.4G or so.

You could probably spend time setting up custom settings to maximize quality as a poster above said but I figure quality on DVDs is only SD so I couldn't be bothered.

My blu Ray discs are not ripped though.

I use Ubuntu to get arround the region issue. Save the movie as an ISO on the NAS then batch rip them overnight as it takes 90 minutes per movie.

Then stream movies using plex server on NAS.

A.

Glassboy

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#1073997 25-Jun-2014 10:14

afe66: I just rip my DVDs with handbrake with High profile after adding the commentary tracks and leave them on my NAS where space isn't an issue. Most movies end up 1.4G or so.

You could probably spend time setting up custom settings to maximize quality as a poster above said but I figure quality on DVDs is only SD so I couldn't be bothered.

I didn't say I was maximising quality (but it does), I'm minimizing size by taking out the archaic over scan.

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