I have two devices that I access from my WD TV Live Plus box: a Win7 laptop and a Seagate Wireless Plus. The WD box is connected using HDMI to my receiver (with HDMI audio passthrough). I can stream/play a 24/96kHz PCM .wav file successfully (as verified by my receiver “96kHz status” on that HDMI connection). However I can only do this successfully if these two sources are accessed as a Network Share using WD navigation. If I acess the same 24/96 file using Media Server (which streams using DLNA), the streaming seems to occur (playback starts and I still have the “96kHz status” on receiver. However there is no sound (except for a click at the start of the playback) … no intermittent sound. Can anyone explain this? Is this a limitation in the DLNA protocol (or bandwidth limitation) versus that used to acces a file as a network share?
Are you using a transcoding DLNA server?
For the Win7 case, I’m not using a separate server, just whatever DLNA server capability comes with Win7 (part of WMP?). As for the Seagate Wireless Plus drive, not sure how its negotiating the streaming or if is transcoding, but the WD TV Live Plus end seems to be taking the 96kHz rate but playback content for some reason isn’t there. I haven’t tried foobar2000 DLNA server yet from Win7.
So for audio purposes, I assume there is no disadvantage to just using the Network Share connection instead of the Media Server connection, as it will stream the content as is (assuming the TV Live can play it) without any recoding?
Just tried foobar2000 v1.1.8 with foo_upnp 0.99.45 and it works properly in streaming 24bit/96kHz PCM .wav (streams to WD TV Live Plus → HDMI_Receiver) and displays 96kHz. So I guess it is a transcoding thing which isn’t working properly with native WIn7 DLNA. I’ll find out from Seagate if there is any control of transcoding/DLNA settings in their Wireless Plus drive.
The configuration I’m targetting is the following:
- Most music content is stored on a Seagate 1 Tb Wireless Plus drive
- Use my Samsung Galaxy S4 phone to select content on the S4 OR content on the Seagate Drive
- Stream the selected content, using S4 to control playback and playlists, to the WD TV Live plus that connects to my receiver via HDMI providing great audio.
This works for up to 24bit/48kHz but I would like the 24bit/96kHz support using this approach, so it looks like the WD TV Live Plus can do it, but the content source (Seagate DLNA server) seems to be limited to below 96kHz sampling rates.
I am wondering - is there an issue with 24-bit, 88.2kHz files? I am trying to host my high-resolution FLAC files off of an external HDD. The WDTV Live will decode and play 24/96 FLAC and give me sound. It will play the 24/88.2 FLAC but I will get no sound. Is this a bug in the firmware?
I am also curious to know if the WDTV Live is capable of decoding my 24/96 FLAC files into stereo PCM and playing it back through my receiver at 24/96. I have read somewhere that the WDTV Live is limited to 24/48 (which would make sense since I haven’t seen any movie soundtracks over 24/48 before). I have also read that it is limited at 16/48 for decoding output. So if someone could shed some light on that, that would be great.
