WD TV (gen 1) cannot play any file in 1.5TB my book essential HDD (WDBAAF0015HBK)

I have my WD TV (gen 1) for 18 months. I have no problems in playing any files in my 1TB My Book HDD. I  ran out of space, so I bought a 1.5 TB My book essential. The screen menu shows up with no problems, but when I select the movie to play, the TV sreen turns black and does nothing. If I reset my WD TV, it will play the move once, but not all the time.

I don’t know if the drive is too big for WD TV gen 1 or the build in software, Smartwave, that causes this problem.

After the WD TV stops playing any vidieo, I swap back to my old WD drive. It still does not play any video.  After I reset the WD TV, I have no problems with my old drive.

What shIld I do to fix my 1.5 TB wd drive? How do I stop the Smartwarve software build in the HDD.

Thanks!

What files are you playing?  If it’s MKV’s, that it sounds like the header compression problem.  Search for it in the WD TV Live boards.  You’ll most likely need to remux the file for it to work.  If you’re concerned about the drive, copy off your data from it (or you will lose the data), and repartition and reformat it.  It might be a bad partition.

Yep, that sounds exactly like the compressed header issue.

Drives up to 2TB are supported, so the drive isn’t “too big”.

Try this:

  • leave your WDTV unplugged for at least 10 minutes, if not longer.
  • while it’s unplugged, attach your USB drive to your PC
  • download MKVToolnix
  • download MKVFix
  • run MKVFix and have it scan (and fix) the files on your USB drive
  • safely remove the USB drive from the PC when it’s done
  • attach the USB drive to the WDTV
  • plug the WDTV back in

You should be good to go, until you try to play other files that also have compression in the headers.

I have a similar problem with a Gen 1 WD TV player. In my case I have an Ultra 3.5" external HDD drive enclosure model ULT40273 with a 1TB WD black 3.5" HDD.

Any MKV movie on this box Ultra cannot be played; I have other boxes from other manufacturers like “Perfect Choice”, “Seagate”, etc. with 1TB and 500GB WD drives, all of them working fine with MKV files.

What I am going to do is swap a hard drive from any other box into the Ultra box and connect it to WD TV player. In theory it should work since the MKV files on that disk drive already work and can be played.

If not, the problem might be with the Ultra box.

Have you seen a post mentioning the Ultra ULT40273 with a Gen 1 WD TV player?

Thanks