Western Digital HDMI USB Media Player?? (WDAVN00BN)

[gustav32]

Any other having problems using USB-hub after 1.02.08 upgrade?

I use USB-hub in order to connect 3 HDs. Before the upgrade there was no problems. WD TV read all the 3 HDs connected to the hub. But after the upgrade, WD TV can just read one of the HDs.

[DarrellS]

The unit was not designed to watch your movies on a PC monitor but to watch on your TV, hence the name WDTV. If you're going to watch them on your PC monitor then you might as well have saved the money you spent on the WDTV and external drive and just watched them straight from your PC.

Surely you have an old analog TV around the house somewhere you can hook composite up to untill you can afford an HDTV. My old 36" Toshiba CRT worked fine until I could afford the 40" Samsung 1080p LCD. The idea behind this unit is to be able to play the movies you usually play on your PC in all their glory on a large screen TV instead of a small PC momitor..

[groberson]

Manual says it supports firmware upgrades via USB to incorporate future codecs. Mine plays everything great except .mkv files. They either just fail to play (99%) or have no audio.

[glenmike]

Then update your unit. Go to: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1001&lang=en

or for the beta go to:
http://www.wdc.com/wdtvprerelease/

[jman98]

I have had ZERO problems with MKV playback. Do note that there is always the "dumbass" factor involving the encoder where some people will use unsupported encoding options for non-PCs. And note as I and others have said many many times that high def audio formats (ie. DTS-HD, DD+, etc.) are NOT supported. No claims of such support are made. I have nothing I can think of that uses AAC, so I can make no claims as to how good/bad AAC support is. But MKV files in high def X.264 with DTS or AC3 audio have always worked for me.

Future codec support via firmware upgrades is dubious as this is really a function of the chip in the unit. You can turn on support for something that the chip supports by the firmware doesn't, but that's all. It may be possible to support DTS-HD, etc. in the future via firmware updates as I think the Sigma chip already supports these, but I wouldn't really call that a codec update. That's a bit misleading.

Players like the WDTV are not PCs and they won't play everything, but again, I have yet to find an MKV file that won't play. Then again, my tastes my be different from some people (ie. I have no interest in Anime, for example).

[dr.bling]

please help, I have purchased the wd-hd about a month ago and sense been trying to backup my dvd collection to portable hd for playback on the wd-hd.....

first off my backup collection of dvds were all made using ether dvd decyper or ripit4me and then shrunk with shrink to fit on a dvd backup disk, now thay all play fine except my kids manage to ruin the backups too so now I want to backup the entire collection to a portable hd to play on the wd-hd player.

What is my best option for best quality playback without having some files not be playable ? I read on here that alot of people use mp4 and then use cover art and that sounds great but is there a loss in video quality ?

or should i just re rip the originals to .iso and leave them unededed ? I dont realy care about extra features on the disks or dts audio as it seams to be too much of a problem at this time.

or does anyone have a guide or the wd-hd to accomplish what i need done ?

any help would be greatly appreciated.. thanks

[jman98]

dr.bling - In my opinion, the WD is a poor choice for playing DVD ISO files. It will do so, yes, but I've yet to figure out how (if it is even possible) to get it to go to the main menu. It simply seems to start playing the movie, leaving you to access the WD menu to change audio/subtitles if necessary. If I am right about this, then this might not be what you want. Or you may not care. I'm just warning you.

Again, I have little to no interest in using it for DVD ISO playing so it's hardly like I have spent a ton of time on this. If there is a way to get to the main menu, I simply don't know what it is.

[dr.bling]

yea, I dont care about the main menue...... the .iso that i got to play works fine and i can sellect the audio stream for the menu on the wd remote....

what about cover art for the movies, anyone knowhow to add cover art ? and were to find it ?

thanks

[jagabo]

Why not rip the main movie as a single VOB or MPG file with DVD Decrypter or your tool of choice?

How much quality you lose when compressing with something like h.264 in MKV or MP4 depends on how much you compress. Compressing to half the DVD MPEG 2 size, while retaining the frame size, will still look very good. Most people probably wouldn't notice the difference.

[dr.bling]

jagabo, I dont care about compresson, only quality...I want exact copys of my originals with or without the bonus junk material, so is there any benifit by converting the video_ts and iso files to mp4 or mkv ?

If so is it better to just rip the origianls straight to mp4 or mkv or should i go off my backups that i converted to fit on sigle sided dvdr's ?

thanks

[jagabo]

jagabo, I dont care about compresson, only quality...I want exact copys of my originals with or without the bonus junk material, so is there any benifit by converting the video_ts and iso files to mp4 or mkv ?

No. Unless the device doesn't play VOB or MPG files correctly. In that case you could use something like MakeMKV to remux the VOB/MPG into an MKV container with no loss of quality.

[dr.bling]

ok, thanks

now is there a way to get cover art on my iso files or video_ts files ?

[vhelp]

..will still look very good. Most people probably wouldn't notice the difference.

pricely. I have seen even some of my poor vids look decent through the wdtv. I'm surprise and amazed. Still, I'm only just starting out with this unit and have yet to gain full throttle use, etc. from this unit. And now that I have my *new*est monitor upgrade, (w/ hdmi) I can't wait to fully test these devices and videos out. I can't wait

. . .

While we are on the subject of wdtv and proper video playability ...

I just realized (and edited below) -- I don't want to put anyone on the spot here, but..
if anyone who has encoded successfully h264 videos via x264 cli tool: could you help us WDTV'ers out by enlightening us with the these "supported options" or encoding settings to use to make the *playable* type videos that wdtv can play ?

* I am talking about straight x264 cli command string, not megui xml profiles, since I would be using directly under that tool, and I don't use megui.

-- x264 encoding (profile) --

-> 720x480
-> 1280x720
-> 1920x1080
-> or the tipicle standards, for when viewing on HD monitors and wdtv

I would test right away, and it would be a great lifesaver for us all, at least get us wdtv'ers jump-started, thank you

-vhelp 5118

[JjMon]

I cannot stress on how HandBreak encodes well for the WDTV, I really do not have a set Preference, I just set resolution to 640, Bitrate to 3k, framerate to 23.976 (if it DVD), 2 Pass. Audio to AAC descrete 6 channel (if it AC3 5.1) 160 Kbps, Under Advanced tab I put all the settings to default, like below




and it all looks good on my Sanyo 50" Plasma, hope that this will help anyone out

[sfpx]

I'm thinking about buying this product.
I quickly read the whole thread (phew).
Some mentionned a audio sync issue on some videos .
Those comments were made before the firmware releases.

Are those sync issues were fixed by the firmware releases ?

Thanks

[dr.bling]

i get a verry slight audo sinc im guessing around 20milliseconds, hopefully i can correct it with my onkio tx-sr803. the wife says very is speeled with one r but my sick is verry slight O and thats with a 100% exact copy iso image

[DarrellS]

So you guys are saying that the unit will support DTS in a MKV container? I can't play DTS in VOB files.

[rumplestiltskin]

IMHO, one of the most important features of the WDTV is that it drives an old SDTV through the red/white/yellow plugs. This permits the unit to keep your old set viable for a longer period of time. Even video that would be considered "marginal" if the WDTV was driving your HDTV looks pretty darn good on that old SDTV.

I've run some HD (720p) video through the WDTV to my 32" Toshiba SDTV and the quality was excellent. SD footage was also excellent as was 512x352 PAL(?) footage that, presumably, came from across the pond.

One thing I tried that didn't work was a video I ran through Submerge to add a subtitle track. Submerge simply added a video track to the ".mov" and this subtitle didn't show up when played on the WDTV. It did display properly on my AppleTV. When I had Submerge export the same video to an H264 with the subtitles embedded, it did play properly in the WDTV (of course).

I have not fooled with MKV, only MP4, H264 and MPEG2, the latter as a set of VOBs opened with MPEG Streamclip and exported as an MPEG file (which only took a few minutes).

If you have an AVI with a ".srt" of the same name (myvideo.avi & myvideo.srt), the WDTV will display the subtitles just fine although I'd like to see a bit more in the way of size and color choices in a future firmware update.

The WDTV box doesn't seem to like SDHC cards in a flash drive adapter but does work quite nicely with "real" flash drives. I've settled on a 500GB 2.5" drive in a USB case as the storage medium for the drive.

User interface: Mostly okay but the nimrods who came up with this stupid "icon view" must be M$ fanboys. They should provide an option to present the menus as text. A picture is worth 10,000 words but (as Robert Langdon says) which words do they mean?

Bottom line: It's a bargain and, almost without exception, plays everything in the formats I normally use.

Oh, one more thing! Without the remote control, the unit is worthless. Thankfully, you can buy an extra from WD's webstore for about $15+tax+shipping.

[DarrellS]

User interface: Mostly okay but the nimrods who came up with this stupid "icon view" must be M$ fanboys. They should provide an option to present the menus as text. A picture is worth 10,000 words but (as Robert Langdon says) which words do they mean?

There is an option to set it to List View instead of Thumbnail View under Browser Display.

Here is the manual...

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/wdtv/ENG/UserManual.pdf

[rumplestiltskin]

User interface: Mostly okay but the nimrods who came up with this stupid "icon view" must be M$ fanboys. They should provide an option to present the menus as text. A picture is worth 10,000 words but (as Robert Langdon says) which words do they mean?

There is an option to set it to List View instead of Thumbnail View under Browser Display.

Here is the manual...

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/wdtv/ENG/UserManual.pdf

That's only for the media on the attached hard drive. The main menu has no other option except icons.

[RabidDog]

jjmon:
IIRC the WDTV doesnt support AAC ? AC3 yes, and it will pass thru Hi-def like LPCM or DTS-HD.

Pictures work in any language, no need to change it on a per-country basis.

You can completely re-skin it with wdlxtv firmware, of course

[sgraves425]

I really like my WDTV. Here's my problem. I've been using MakeMKV to covert from BluRay, which works great for me. Up til now I've had no need for subtitles. A couple movies released recently have scenes that are not in english. I've checked this thread, and searched but no luck. How can I get a .srt file from a BluRay disc?
Thanks

[JjMon]

RabidDog,

It supports it, I have all my backups in AAC, AC3, MP3. Mainly in AAC 5.1 (6 Channel Discrete) unless the audio is in dolby then i select the dolby.

Yep I have on mine " ext3-boot firmware " it works great. my whole setup is 1 PC serving all my media via NFS ( Network File Sharing ) and my " 2 " WDTV on lan reading from 1 machine at the same time while reading the same file at the same time. I am vary pleased of the outcome of this Unit. Thanks to all of those coders out there for making this happen. SALUTE!

[Des]

I really like my WDTV. Here's my problem. I've been using MakeMKV to covert from BluRay, which works great for me. Up til now I've had no need for subtitles. A couple movies released recently have scenes that are not in english. I've checked this thread, and searched but no luck. How can I get a .srt file from a BluRay disc?
Thanks

I had a similar problem with the Japanese scenes in both Kill Bill movies, amongst others. I can't tell you how to do this with MakeMKV, because I use AutoMKV. The solution for me is to select the 0-English subtitle set and then in the Advanced Options tab of AutoMKV and check the 'burn subtitle' option in the Muxing box.

I don't knowif MakeMKV has anything similar but maybe this info can help.

--dES

[rumplestiltskin]

Anything I encode for iPod or AppleTV plays just fine in the WD device. So that's H264 with AAC audio.

If I have a subtitle -track- in the video, the WD device won't play it but if I drop in an avi and srt of the same name (but with the correct extensions), the WD device will display the subtitles.

With the exception of the icon view main menu (I'd prefer plain text like my AppleTV), the device is great.

[Raycaster]

A couple Newbie Questions:

Purchased the unit yesterday and read thru this thread (Great Info!).

1) I have a few mkv files that seem to have "blur" moments that you can just barely notice when the action gets a little too busy. Is this simply due to the format sampled to high or perhaps a USB transfer problem? Non

2) Is the WD TV picky about mkv files? It stopped playing a certain .mkv file after a minute or so when the PC plays it right thru. The file may be bad but as mentioned the PC plays it no problem.

3) Handbrake has been mentioned as a great encoder for optimum WD TV file format but has anyone found a CUDA/STREAM app workable? Using Expresso or BadaBoom to encode to IPOD is a huge time saver and was hoping a simple workflow using CUDA acceleration is available. I'll be playing with this ASAP but wondering if any users here have already had success.

Being able to toss any format at a CUDA app and have it spit out a optimum WD TV format would be AWESOME!

[CBC]

ok, thanks

now is there a way to get cover art on my iso files or video_ts files ?

Save your pic as 120 px X 180 px, name it EXACTLY as your movie name as,

My Movie.iso
My Movie.jpg

Do Google search in Images for your movie art

[B2K24]

Then update your unit. Go to: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=1001&lang=en

or for the beta go to:
http://www.wdc.com/wdtvprerelease/

whats the difference between the latest official and the beta?
what are more people using? Any drawbacks to beta?
does this unit allow downgrading to previous firmwares?

[neomaine]

... my whole setup is 1 PC serving all my media via NFS ( Network File Sharing ) and my " 2 " WDTV on lan reading from 1 machine at the same time while reading the same file at the same time. ...

The WDTV has a network option? I've been going back and forth between the Popcorn Hour and the WDTV and was leaning towards the PH since it had network connectivity. Can you confirm/explain how you have this setup? Thanks!

[jagabo]

The firmware for the WDTV is open source so there are a lot of mods, including network (via USB network adapter) and external USB DVD drive support. For example: http://b-rad.cc/wdlxtv