Well my personal advice, people should stay away from western digital live for now as it is filled with bugs and there are lot of issues coming up.
In xtreamer so many issues were not present after the launch apart from fan noise issue which people felt and was rectified. Also wdtv still does not support an internal hard drive the hardware may be an improved version but you need supporting firmware to make any hardware successful.
Please find below the list of things that are working great in wdtv live -
So, to be affirmative, here is a list of WDTV Live's features that work more than satisfactory:
1) Perfect playback of majority of formats (not all, but can you ask for all to work really?), including the most demanding h.264 1080p MKV at more than 5 reframes.
2) 23.976 fps works perfectly, at last, also any other fps, without stuttering.
3) Cool user interface, fast enough, nice preview feature.
4) From my experience, WDTVLIVE share works perfectly, fast (6.5 - 7.5 MB/s) and without dropouts, when accessed from a PC.
5) Playback from network also works fine (of course, if you can access shares at all), no performace problems.
6) YouTube works fine.
7) DTS decoding works fine.
Here is a list of issues with WDTV Live -
1) Not all PC Windows shares are visible on WDTV Live - most of the times only couple of them.
There is also a random situation - try to enter "Video -> Network Shares" and nothing happens - no response to pressing ENTER button. Power cycle doesn't make any difference, not even unplugging the unit from power.
In the same time, you can access the WDTVs' shares from the PC and copy files, without any problems and interruptions. It seems that this part of netwoking is functioning flawless. YouTube is also working.
2) After powering off the unit (shutdown, then disconnection the power), and powering on again, the subtitle default option goes to off.
3) After some time of inactivity, the USB connected disks dissapear, even the USB LED on the WDTV Live is off.
If you try to access the WDTVLIVE share from the PC, you will still see the disk, but, instead of its folders, you'll see there some of your PC shares names
(weird, ha?) and all of them empty.
Dissapeared disks often can't be detected only by plugging them off and on; you have to disconnect and reconnect the power from WDTV Live.
4) You can't disconnect USB disk safely (by pressing EJECT on the remote) from the WDTV Live if its share is opened on the PC; WDTV is just doing "busy" circle for a very long time, without any warning.
5) Lack of consistent MP4 support.
6) movie.jpg in the same folder with movie.mkv show up twice for network shares.
7) Using HDMI to DVI it defaults back to 480p on some older tvs when you try to set 1080i even though the tv is 1080i - this does not happen with the 1st gen WDTV HD Media Player.
8) Playing over a Wireless "N" network keeps losing it's connection every few minutes.
During my tests I always had 2, 3 or 4 bars of reception. I tried 2 different N adapters (both on the "tested" list", 2 different routers, and 2 different PCs (one XP and one Vista).
It always works at first and then about 5 minutes later...lost connection.
9) Some VOB files seem to be miss read by the unit. For example, my DVDs are broken up into multiple VOB files for each movie. Each VOB is about 1 gig each and the play time is roughly 23 minutes long. The unit does not correctly determine the correct playing time and reads some vob files to be anywhere from 4 minutes to 9 minutes long. I wish it would just play the VIDEO_TS.IFO file for DVD playing. When these VOB are playing, the unit would shut it self down some of the time.
10) Playing music files over HDMI, the first half-second of the song is cut off. This did NOT happen with the original WDTV on the same receiver connected with the same HDMI cable to the same HDMI port, so it is DEFINITELY a problem caused by the WDTV-LIVE.
Confirmed with both network and local files, and both uncompressed WAV and compressed FLAC.
Tried new cable (HDMI 1.3b certified). Same result - first 1/2 second of song is cut off. Didn't happen with WDTV1.
11) Pandora account login isn't staying resident on WDTVLive, i.e. I have to type in my account info each & every time.
The above have been reported by users in their posts on AVS.
Coming to the cost it is costing Rs 7200 from 20th north as other users have already posted in the forum.Add another 1.5k to that for usb wireless . It comes to Rs 8700.
So will recommend to hold on to that purchase for those who are planning to buy the wdtv live as some of the issues are really frustrating. Once they have a firmware update out to address the issue, it will be a good player ....
