WD TV media player export

[Zackery Bent]

From what I am reading 15mbps is good. If that number increases you get into stuttering issues especially over 20mbps.

[Jeremy Doyle]

I always just use the Apple TV 2 preset. However, it’s only 720 not 1080. It runs at bit rate of 10. I use my WDTV on a 720 TV so it’s not a big deal to me, it might be to you though.

[Zackery Bent]

Sounds like a good place to start from- thanks Jeremy!

[Chris Babbitt]

I use M2t instead of H.264 with fairly high bit-rates (25-30 mbps). When I first got my WDTV, I did some experimenting with H.264 files, and for some reason, the player wouldn’t give me audio, so I gave up and went with M2t, which has worked great ever since.

[Jason Brown]

I use a legacy version of the WDTV, the one before all of the network connectivity stuff they introduced.

Almost 2 years ago, I wanted to discover the limitation of the box, so I did multiple tests and I was able to run h264 in .mov container at 45Mbps without any issues on playback (from USB drive). I didn’t go any higher…because that is more than enough and reaches the limitation of Blu-ray in terms of bit-rate.

The only tweaky things I did discover was in using my Matrox MAX accellerated compression…if I compressed with the generic mp4 compression setting in Compressor, it worked fine. If I used the Matrox codec to encode to, I had audio cutting out with bit-rates above 3-4Mbps (using AAC audio) other audio codecs worked fine. I tracked this down to the fact that “hinted streaming” needed to be enabled. I think this was only a limitation when using the Matrox hardware to speed up compression from what I remember. The Matrox folks were awesome in helping me track that problem down.

My company uses these for tradeshow video playback…so I have developed a clean workflow for encoding for them.

-Jason

[Zackery Bent]

Thanks all for the great feedback!