23.976 Playback smooth on the WDTV Live or Live Plus?

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

I own one of the original WDTV player “A” series Gen.1. It does a good job except for 1 issue that was never resolved.  When playing 23.976 material (mkvs mostly), 1080p or 720p, there exists a judder every 41 seconds. 90% of the Bluray HD material is in 23.976 and since my TV handles Cinema modes I would prefer using the 23.976/24 rather than the 60.  Owners of the old WDTV should know all about the 41sec/24F stutter bug.

Ready to upgrade player, I think…

I would love to buy the new WD TV Live Plus. Have they fixed the 23.976 41 second judder issue?  If I play a 23.976 bluray mkv on the Live is it smooth?

My inderstanding is new firmware when selected to 1080p 24 will auto switch between the ubiqitous 23.976 or the more unusual 24F… Is this correct? Using HDMI of course.

I don’t even mind having to set the output on the player to stay in 1080p 24 mode as that covers most of my material.

Any feedback, obervations or input greatly appreciated. Anyone playing 23.976 material in 24 mode?

My playback will be using WD harddrives connected via USB, so streaming mkv files won’t be a factor.

I asked similar question in the WDTV Hub forum (got no response), but now that I think about it maybe I don’t need the internal storage of the WDTV Hub as I have a few 2 TB WD green drives. Why spend the extra $100, especially if this bug still exists.

Thanks in advance.

2

You need to be careful, because what you’re describing isn’t really accurate. 

For one thing, there’s no such thing as 720p24 HDMI mode.   There’s only 720p60 and 720p50.   So 23.976 (or 24, for that matter) displayed at 720p will have 3:2 pulldown, which is MUCH different than the 41s “judder” you’re talking about.

What happens is that devices that output 24p material at 23.976fps, there will be a single video frame dropped roughly every 40 seconds.

Or conversely, when a device plays 23.976fps material at 24p, there will be an extra DUPLICATE FRAME inserted every 40 seconds.

Some players will actually just play 24.000 at 23.976 (resulting in a 0.1% FASTER playtime) or vice versa, meaning a 2-hour movie would actually play out 1 minute sooner, and the audio is sped up to match.   This is similar to the VERY common PAL to NTSC conversion where 50Hz material is just played at 60Hz, and the audio is sped up, yielding a semi-tone higher pitch in the audio.

I don’t believe the WDTV Live/+ do 23.976 at all, but I wouldn’t swear to it.   My TV supports both modes, but never says 23.976.   

23.976 and 24.000 were BOTH listed as HDMI options on the WDTV Live / Live+ on some really old firmwares, but the 23.976 option was removed.

I think ti outputs all 23.976 or 24.000 fps material at 24fps, but again, I can’t verify.

The 41s “Judder” you’re describing is, in practice, so rare that most people will never notice it.