WDTV Forum Is World's Worst

Edit: The sound problems I experienced was indeed the HDMI incompatibility with the particular Vizio TV model I was using. I don't know why the WDTV worked with the bad TV until I updated the firmware but once things went south, I could never retrieve it. I grabbed another Vizio we had and both Roku and WDTV work fine. Now we have another thing to worry about when selecting a new TV, will it work with streaming boxes. I suspect the newer and better models may have improved HDMI. Below are my struggles.

I have a WDTV Gen 3 and installed the new (1.10) firmware update. Henceforth the sound had echoes and was generally quite terrible. So I went to the WD community forum and registered to ask for suggestions. While the guys on the forum were helpful and friendly, the forum itself holds a world's record for crappiness. I had to register three times to make three posts. Finally it remembered my log in with the third name/password combination but, being a craptastic record holder, they have an equally terrible Captcha security that is unreadable most of the time. I guess this is one way to hold down posting volume. But even if you miraculously discern the cryptic alpha numeric code, chances are great that you will be thwarted by an "unexpected error". I have yet to find a decently accessible forum community for the WDTV device. Probably the captcha requirement vanishes after a certain number of posts if you can tolerate the procedure long enough.

As to my sound problem, I rolled back to the previous firmware (1.09) and still had sound issues. I love the device which had been flawless up until the point of upgrade. I think it may have something to do with the WD being able to sync with the TV's HDMI. My Vizio model has such HDMI incompatibility with ROKU as to make ROKU unusable with this TV. Things finally straightened out after I tried the composite video (which was intolerable) and then went back to HDMI. Maybe it forced both the TV and WD to freshly negotiate a sync. This is only a wild guess but it seems to be working fine now.

This said, we do live in a world of digital coincidence. The router may have been doing something improperly, Netflix could have been wonky, or what ever else might have been causing the problems. The moral of the story is to not give up trying different options and combinations. This may have worked with the new firmware update but I'm not going to risk it. Version 1.09 works for me and I will avoid 1.10 unless something goes bad again.

These little boxes are nice but if you can use a computer for streaming don't bother with these boxes. But WDTV and ROKU, when they work, are great. When they don't, you are in for abounding frustration.

My Netflix stream is once again very high def. and the audio is crisp and clear.

There, I got that out of my system.

Oh, oh ... I'm hearing a little clicking/tapping sound. I may not be out of the woods yet.

Well, things deteriorated fast so I might as well do the v1.10 again, reset, unplug and fire up. Streaming just fine now. I'm wondering if I didn't have a grandson gaming and sucking up all the bandwidth? Time for extreme measures so I put the WDTV on highest priority QoS on my DSL router. Let's see if that helps. My MTU is 1462 which should be acceptable for DSL. My gosh, the picture is fantastic on this thing.