No Audio WDTV
While an awesome player of all things multimedia from a USB storage device to your television, it's not always perfect. Here are some known audio issues that I have discovered.
The WDTV cannot pass DTS out the HDMI wire, so you must remux it to AC3 to hear the audio. That thread can be found here:
http://wdtvforum.com/main/index.php?topic=54.0
You could just hook up an optical cable to your DTS capable home theater receiver, as the player cannot read the DTS information, and therefore cannot pass it out. The receiver, however can do a great job with this superior audio format.
An issue with the WDTV appears when files are made by newer versions of mkvmerge starting with v 4.1.0. Compression is now set by default, and the WDTV cannot currently uncompress the audio. There are some ways to fix it, the most expedient seemed to be mkWDclean from matroska to fix the problem. They have a current source package, and also a binary for win32 ready to go. Here's a link:
http://www.matroska.org/downloads/mkclean.html
After some failed attempts to get the mkWDclean to compile and work, and faced with the unappealing idea of working solely at the command prompt level, I decided to do some reading about a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for mkWDclean, or something that would allow me to repair the problem. I quickly found tips on videohelp.com and a quick blurb from user mrbass that would let me fix the issue. After downloading mkvtoolnix gui, I was able to open a file, point it to the audio portion and then remux the file. So far, this has worked perfectly for me with no loss of quality.
Hopefully WD will soon release a firmware patch to resolve this problem, but in the meantime, at least I can still work around it.
The WDTV cannot pass DTS out the HDMI wire, so you must remux it to AC3 to hear the audio. That thread can be found here:
http://wdtvforum.com/main/index.php?topic=54.0
You could just hook up an optical cable to your DTS capable home theater receiver, as the player cannot read the DTS information, and therefore cannot pass it out. The receiver, however can do a great job with this superior audio format.
An issue with the WDTV appears when files are made by newer versions of mkvmerge starting with v 4.1.0. Compression is now set by default, and the WDTV cannot currently uncompress the audio. There are some ways to fix it, the most expedient seemed to be mkWDclean from matroska to fix the problem. They have a current source package, and also a binary for win32 ready to go. Here's a link:
http://www.matroska.org/downloads/mkclean.html
After some failed attempts to get the mkWDclean to compile and work, and faced with the unappealing idea of working solely at the command prompt level, I decided to do some reading about a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for mkWDclean, or something that would allow me to repair the problem. I quickly found tips on videohelp.com and a quick blurb from user mrbass that would let me fix the issue. After downloading mkvtoolnix gui, I was able to open a file, point it to the audio portion and then remux the file. So far, this has worked perfectly for me with no loss of quality.
Hopefully WD will soon release a firmware patch to resolve this problem, but in the meantime, at least I can still work around it.
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