WHAT IS IT WITH THESE **bleep** UPDATES??

[abfitch]

yesterday, everything played fine.   I update to 3.0.1 and now most .avi and other file types just give the spinning thingy!  Playon wont work now...same spinning thingy!   Every freakin' time, why are these updates so bad???

This is it.   I'm going to rollback to a version that worked and just give up trying to update.

[abfitch]

Oh, and a plea to any other manufacture out there...Please, please, please give Western Digital some competition and make a player like the Live Hub that actually works consistently well even after firmware updates.   My old Tivo box comes to mind. 6 years old but always works. UI is fast and pleasing.  Remote built sturdy.  I don't have to stand back everytime there is a update praying that it will still work after the updating is done. 

It's Christmas.  Please Santa hear my prayer!!!!!!!

[IronSpine]

Have had the product a long time now. WD has had ample opportunity to focus on highly optimizing it for performance and stability. Instead they've simply focused on adding more and more stuff, where the stuff itself is utterly broken sluggish **bleep**, partly due to the dog slow box hardware and the rest due to implementation.

WD could (should) have reached total ownage of the segment with a superior product. Instead it's just a roadmap for others to use as "ok, support as many formats as possible but avoid this, don't do that, pay attention, make it fast, make it reliable." and it'll be the opposite of Live HUB (i.e, it'll be a nice, fast, robust product).

Long ago I replaced the set of "Wait" images with an animated squirrel running in a cage over the little chugging live hub box. As soon as I take the time to actually research quality hardware to replace it, my live hub will be tossed into a fire pit.

Wonder if it melts as slowly as it executes? I'm going to find out soon I think.

Edited:

Looks like the market finally has some good possibilities. Anyone have experience with the Uebo M400?

[TonyPh12345]

---

abfitch wrote:

Oh, and a plea to any other manufacture out there...Please, please, please give Western Digital some competition and make a player like the Live Hub that actually works consistently well even after firmware updates.   My old Tivo box comes to mind. 6 years old but always works. 

---

... and your old Tivo cost $400+, and you had to pay $13.00 per month to use it!  

I'm sure you'd get a FANTASTIC media player for that...  It's called a Win7-based MPC, and $13.00 per month worth of subscription services.  

[abfitch]

nope.  My old tivo was $200 at circuit city.  I had no monthly fee's (not sure why that would matter) and I'll bet the hardware wasnt near as good as what's in the Hub and yet it worked so much better.

My Tivo was rock solid...the Hub is a delicate flower which needs to be"powered off", "factory reset", firmware rolled back", "paperclips pushed into holes" , "pleaded with", "prayed over"... etc, etc.

[othermark]

---

abfitch wrote:

Oh, and a plea to any other manufacture out there...Please, please, please give Western Digital some competition and make a player like the Live Hub that actually works consistently well even after firmware updates.   My old Tivo box comes to mind. 6 years old but always works. UI is fast and pleasing.  Remote built sturdy.  I don't have to stand back everytime there is a update praying that it will still work after the updating is done. 

It's Christmas.  Please Santa hear my prayer!!!!!!!

---

Not defending the lack of QA here, WD definitely should have a library of problem media files from support calls and test each firmware release with them -- and by test I mean actually play them and listen to the audio.

I do want to point out that the Tivo is a bad analogy here.   The box does one thing -- capture a stream, dump it to MPEG-2 and play it back.   Of course that's not going to fail.

The WD box has a cornacopia of codecs and format support.   This is why we all bought it and why we end up with these problems.   

Also, to be fair, Tivo had there trials and tribulation with optical audio as well.   Once they had it working well, it didn't break.

[SharpBarb]

---

abfitch wrote:...the Hub is a delicate flower which needs to be"powered off", "factory reset", firmware rolled back", "paperclips pushed into holes" , "pleaded with", "prayed over"... etc, etc.

---

I just want to concur with the statement above. I wish they would stop adding more features and just fix and refine the features that are already there.