Custom Firmware, Modifying Options

[purplebox123]

I dont know why it didnt show my message but the issue/wishlist is:-

I just got my self a WDTV live SMP and it's really nice, works great. The only issue now is there is no Custom Firmware/mods to it. From what I read it's because it got encryption on it.

So should I wait for that or take it back and replace it with the older model WDTV live plus ?

Thanks.

[WDUser]

Since no custom FW has been released for the Live Hub as well so far, I doubt there's gonna be any for the SMP.

[outburst]

What is it that you want in custom firmware?

I had custom firmware on my Live and quite honestly, WD seems to have copied a lot of in making the SMP. You can do backdrops, themes, metadata tagging, browser log-in and more. All of that was only previously possible with custom firmware - now it's baked right in.

[Zaph0d]

You're absolutely right. WD did "incorporate" many of the features of WDLXTV that they were missing in the firmware for the new units. Unfortunately they've done a really poor job of it, though. I've had very poor results with the "Media Library" functionality of the new units, and I've tried both the Hub (with it's unusably slow hard drive - I literally mean $5 flash drive speed!) and the standalone G3/SMP which basically share the same (encrypted) firmware. Both units would completely hang and became unresponsive when a hard drive with anything other than a perfectly titled video, audio, or image file was connected - which is all my drives since there's no way to tell it to index only certain folders on attached storage. So I returned the drives to my PC and went back to network shares, but figured I'd try adding a couple to this Media Library. I figured that might work better since it will only search folders that I tell it to - I could limit it to only folders containing only video. But that wasn't good enough, either. The units would both seize up while performing the dreaded (and excruciatingly LONG and frequent) process of compiling the media library. So I turned the Media Library "feature" back off and went back to DLNA streaming using Serviio. It's completely free and found 99% of my collection's metadata in a fraction of the time that the WDTV spent trying to do so.

Maybe WD will get it right on some future firmware release, but right now their Media Library feature leaves much to be desired. The shifty buggers have decided to encrypt the firmware, which probably violates the GPL license that makes up the bulk of the code involved, so WDLXTV is not likely comming for these models at all. A DLNA media server is a good alternative while we wait - there's several free ones available.

Z