Playback freezes a few minutes into every movie

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

Hi all,

I have been using my WD Live for a week now and tried a few movies, some avi and mkv, all read from a usb hard drive attached to the gadget (no network). A few minutes into any of these movies (say 3 min or so) the image freezes. The usb led keeps flashing, I can only assume it’s buffering the data. After a few minutes the flashing stops and I can resume watching the movie. It´s happened as I say with all about 5 movies I’ve tried so far. What’s wrong? Faulty gadget? Slow harddrive? Any ideas please?

Many thanks

2

Welcome to the forums.

Could you post the MediaInfo on one of the movies you’ve having a problem with?

(Although, offhand, the first thing I’d try is to reformat that drive and then copy some of the files back on it).

3

The flashing indicates that the WD is re-compiling the Media Library.

Are you waiting for the flashing to STOP before you try to start playing a video, or does the flashing START only when you are playing?

4

Hi,

the flashing is there when the movie starts. After 10min or so it stops. For avi movies I don’t think it flashes again but I was just trying with a 720p MKV and it flashed at the beginning of the movie, then stopped and then after about 45 min it started flashing again and the image froze.

Not sure if hard drive is FAT32 or NTSC, would this make a difference?

Thanks

5

No, the drive could be formatted either way – as I said, reformat just to see.

(NTFS is better for videos as it supports files greater than 4GB)

6

When you say reformat, is that in case the drive is fragmented?

7

No, just to clear up any possible issues with the drive.  Never hurts to eliminate it as a problem.

If you have a USB flash drive you could try that as well – the idea in troubleshooting is to eliminate all potential issues to isolate the cause.

8

Hi all, sorry for the delay. Been keeping an eye on this and it seems that the unit behaves worse the more files you have in your hard drive. I wiped out clean the hard drive and just copied a bunch of movies, seemed to behaved. Dumped a backup of some files (many 1000s) and now it cuts every movie after about 15-20min, led blinking like crazy. I imagine it’s trying to index every single file in the unit into the .wdtv folder, but why on Earth does it want to do that??? Don’t care why, can it be stopped from doing so?

Thanks

9

I asume you DO have media library turned off, correct?  Because otherwise it will definitely index everything.

Apparently it WILL write that file even with media library turned off, but I’m not sure what it’s writing there.  It may be caching thumbnails (that would be my guess).  You could try letting it run for a day or two and see if it stops then.  You could also try making that file Read-Only (have to do this on your PC) although the firmware might override that.  Other than that the best advice about putting 1000s of files on a drive  is the old doctor’s one when the patient said “Doc, it hurts when I do this” and he replied “Don’t do that!”.

10

Hey, thanks for the (quick!) reply. Ok will try that and let you know. I just have this one hard drive so I dump everything in there, sounds like I might have a dedicated one just for movies (but not too many…). Regarding the indexing issue, it doesn’t index everything and then it stops. The movies start fine, and then after EVERY 15-20 the led starts blinking and the shows freeze, I normally have to pause it for a while then press play again and the movie comes back for another 15-20mi. After this it repeats again: more freezing and blinking, it’s like it runs out of steam or something… weird.

11

Hi all,

thought I’d give an update on this. Switched off teh Media Library feature and the player playes perfectly now, not sure what I’m missing without it but I can for sure see my movies with no interruptions.

Thanks

12

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