Since I’ve had the Gen2, I haven’t had a problem with the remote whatsoever. In the end, after about 3 different contacts with WD support and 1 contact with Samsung, I was able to get WD to swap it out for a Gen2 (probably refurbished but hey, it works). Or, when it did go away, like I said, the unit wouldn’t respond to the remote at all. With the Samsung, you can turn off the energy savings mode and it’ll help a bit but personally, with all of these little fixes, I could only lessen the problem and not get it to completely go away. Also, I didn’t cover the LEDs, just the receiver. After applying this hack, there were times when I had to turn the TV off, turn the player on, then turn the TV on to get the player to respond. I tried this and it kinda worked, but the remote was sometimes unresponsive whatsoever.

A nice walkthrough of the fix you’re referring to can be found here (with minor differences of course):

They fixed this problem with the Gen2, Live, and I would imagine the Mini as well. This isn’t a problem with all TVs but is for certain Samsung and Philips models and is only a problem with the Gen1. We don’t even know what kind of TV the original poster has. Ok, we don’t know for sure that it IS the TV causing the problem because the details in the original post are very scarce.

All player remote