WD Live crashes (blackout) during video playback, must unplug to start over Options

[harm1307]

My wd live has been working just fine for the first 3-4 months I have owned it. I run two external hard drives through it. One is a 2TB hard drive for all my tv shows, other is a 3TB hard drive for all my movies. Both are filled up with less than 50 free GB left on each drive. Recently, I will go to watch a movie, it plays fine for anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes and then the entire system crashes, blackout of picture and sound..everything is frozen in darkness. My only option is to unplug the media player and plug back in to start over. I have no idea why this started happening, I have been downloading many movies from torrent sites and then placing them on my external hard drive so I can watch them through the media player. There are over 2000 movies on my external hard drive. I recently added about a hundred or so movies right before this happened. I guess it could be a bad file, but considering all 2000 movies were downloaded this way, its hard to believe that this is the reason for the crashes. Every movie plays no problem on my PC. Also, the 2TB harddrive does the same thing as well now and I have not added anything new to that hard drive. Please someone help me if you have any ideas..thankyou

[WDUser]

Things to try:

1) Soft reset via Settings

2) Hard reset using button provided

3) Delete the .WD_TV Media Library folder on the HDD, and run a thorough disk check using your PC

4) Check if the player is running hot, and point a table fan at it

[harm1307]

thankyou for trying to help...I did everything you said, but it still blacks out. The unit works fine without the hard drive attached and the hard drive works fine hooked to pc...very strange..not sure what else to do..thinking about buying a micca m-play now...any other other suggestions would help...btw...I deleted the .wd file from hard drive and most of it deleted but a couple files inside that folder would not delete (says corrupted file can not delete) I tried to do run dskchk but it did nothing...not sure if i did thorough disk check correctly.

[WDUser]

The unit works fine without the hard drive attached

How else are you watching videos? You mean during playback of videos over the network it doesn't black out?

btw...I deleted the .wd file from hard drive and most of it deleted but a couple files inside that folder would not delete (says corrupted file can not delete) I tried to do run dskchk but it did nothing...not sure if i did thorough disk check correctly.

If Windows says the files are corrupted, then maybe that's the reason for the problem. Can't be 100% sure of course, but won't know unless you solve the issue and try again. Steps for running a thorough bad sector check on your disk are given here and here. Also, remember to always safely remove/eject the disk from both the PC and player when you're done with it, instead of simply yanking the cord or powering down.

[Arrakis-Dune]

I have had that problem with the new unit I put in a friend's place too... and I cannot understand as I have the exact same setup at my place. I took the first WDTV Live back to the shop I bought it from and the guy swapped it for a brand new one (I buy a lot of stuff from him) and exactly the same thing happened with the new one in less than 5 minutes. The previous model of WDTV player has no such issues and plays perfectly (the one with the small remote control)

Tonight my WDTV Live encountered the same problem... watching a 1080p movie in mp4 format on a 3TB WD My Book Essential (I have 2 X 3TB drives... one with Movies and 1 with TV Series - each partitioned into 2 X 1.5TB) the movie froze and it 'unmounted' the drive and I wasn't able to find it until I unplugged the power from the HDD and replugged it into the drive. After the 3rd time I took the HDD off...connected it to my laptop and ran a scandisc and disc defragmenter... no errors were found.

I haven't done any recent updates with the WDTV Live as I have heard there have been some issues... but think I might have solved my problem. After the problems kept happening, I changed and watched a TV series episode on my other 3TB drive... and that worked fine... so I switched off the player and plugged my Movie hard drive into the front USB port on the WDTV Live player (That was the port that the TV Series drive was plugged into) ... then I was able to watch a normal DVD rip movie, so I tried a 1080p movie and that has been playing for over 35 minutes... so there could be a problem with the rear USB port on the WDTV Live Player...OR... the fact that I have only 1 hard drive plugged into it at the moment.

Seeing that there is nothing concrete here with this error... maybe this could be the problem - Insufficent power to the USB ports (even though the WD My Book Essential has it's own external power source - and I am using all the original cables and power adaptors). I will experiment tomorrow with plugging the other drive in or watchoing on USB Thumbdrives and see what happens.

Hope this solves your problem too. Cheers