Bought a WD TV mini :(

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Bought a WD TV mini :(

1 | 2

Ragnor

8085 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#478130 5-Jun-2011 23:43

ilovemusic: The WD media players are pooz in features, usability and performance.

A friend thought he was upgrading from his old Asus O!Play but the WD was several steps backwards in every regard.

Which WDTV are you talking about, if you mean the live which was released around a year before the OiPlay most people still rate the WDTV Live better...eg:

Asus OiPlay vs WDTV Live
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1186715

Sharesies kids

Free kids accounts - trade shares and funds (NZ, US) with Sharesies (affiliate link).

tdgeek

28600 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#478159 6-Jun-2011 09:35

---Which WDTV are you talking about, if you mean the live which was released around a year before the OiPlay most people still rate the WDTV Live better...eg:

Seems he got the WDTV with expectations of a Media Centre PC, or he's just plain hard to please!

ilovemusic

1425 posts

Uber Geek

#478184 6-Jun-2011 11:23

I was talking about the black (original ?) WD TV Media Player and the WDTV Live Hub 1TB Media Drive with built-in HDD.

Don't pay much attention to AVS forum, the place is shillsville !

I may well have gotten a lemon but;

Even a media player should provide more info on the files being played than the WD's very basic display.

Definitely no flv playback on the WD TV.
The Live Hub specs say it will play FLV (h.264) but we didn't have any files in that format.

The remotes are very different, the WD TV had a small mini remote, whereas the WDTV Live Hub got a full sized remote.

Settings were originally by the book, then the video resolution setting was changed to a manual setting which stopped the audio dropouts. This I suspect was a HDMI compatibility issue.

The drive scan problems maybe due to the size of the drive (2TB) ?

Definitely hard to please.

Having said that the Asus met expectations once it was updated with the latest firmware whereas the WDs with latest FW still had problems.

JimmyH

2820 posts

Uber Geek

#478371 6-Jun-2011 22:20

My respose:

It's a nice compact size.

-- Yep

Mediocre construction, poor quality connectors.

-- Really? The build quality of my two is fine in both cases.

Tiny, often unresponsive remote.

-- This is true of my WD TV, the Live model is much better. I understand the Hub is even better.

Ugly uniformative interface.

-- Yes, it's bloody ugly. Works OK tho.

Poor info display modes, that lacks basic info like picture resolution, frame rate, number of active audio channels, data rate etc.

-- True...but you should know/ can check this before you put the files onto it. It's a sub-$200 media player, not a media center PC.

No flv or rmvb playback, problems with mkv compressed headers.

-- All the MKVs I have tried work. FLVs have worked for the last few firmware revisions, I have tried a few and they all work. Granted, it doesn't play rmvb - but does anyone actually have, or encode files to, that format these days?

HDMI connectivity issues.

-- both mine connect flawlessly.

Mediocre picture and sound quality (HDMI into a Marantz 8002 AVR and Panasonic 50" TV).

-- Picture quality is superb if the file is encoded well and at a sufficient bitrate. Sound seems fine, but haven't tried through a full surround system yet.

The newer WDTV Live Hub has a better interface and remote but still lacks a display mode with basic info and still has HDMI issues like audio dropouts when using the auto resolution setting.

-- yes it has a better interface and remote. I don't have one yet, but haven't read any reviews citing HDMI issues or audio dropouts? As I'm contemplating purchase, I'm very interested if you can refer us to any?

The re-scanning of newly attached or re-attached external drives is also a PIA.

-- Only done when content is added. If it bugs you, then turn it off. It's not necessary to add/play new content (unless you want thumbnails) and disabling the scan is an obvious menu option.

EDIT: Typos.

1 | 2