Keep Your WDTV Media Library Turned OFF

The Media Library function… is not good…This is just “Roman’s Opinion” so follow it if you want… but you need to keep your Media Library function turned OFF as a general rule…What is the Media Library?

Well… in theory, the media library is supposed to speed up operation of your WDTV by indexing all of your stuff. I am pretty sure that it goes off of Meta Tags for your music and videos… although most of my videos don’t have Meta Tags and my music is hit or miss. It is what makes the “search” function work, so you might be hurting if you use that a lot and turn this off.

In practice it screws stuff up for the most part, it can really slow your system down and it will take a lot longer to recognize drives that you plug in. It also doesn’t behave well with some custom firmware and a lot of extra apps that work with it.

I don’t ever use the search function because I keep my folders extremely organized on my drive. I also have a 1.5 Terabyte WD Elements drive plugged in which is about 2/3 full. I don’t have networking set up right now so that means I unplug it fairly often to put more stuff on it. Hence, I plug it IN quite often, so the system recognition time is a big deal to me (and it is a big drive with lots of stuff).

Do I ever use it? 

Eventually I am going to go through a tutorial on networking the WDTV and setting up shares so you can stream movies and music from another device on your network. The general rule for this is to STILL leave the Media Library “off.” However, sometimes for shares to show up, you have to turn it on for a minute or two to force the system to re-detect stuff (that is my explanation at least). But once the shares show up, I turn it back off.

(UPDATE: I have been using wireless networking with my 1st Gen WDTV successfully for quite some time now, I never use the media library function and I haven’t had any issues with shares showing up…)

How do I turn it off?

Turning this off is very easy. On your WDTV, from the main (home) screen, navigate to settings, then select “system”. Inside of here your will see “Media Library.” Select it and set it to “off”