WDTV Live media player and network sharing issue

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Ultimate Geek
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#153641 3-Oct-2014 14:33

I picked up a WDTV Live media player from Harvery Norman yesterday. I understand it's the 3rd gen version

With my setup I have a TP-Link W8980 with a USB hard drive to share media. With TP-Link you have to manually enter the ip address to access the files (192.168.1.1)

Unfortunately the WDTV doesn't allow you to manually enter an address

I see, with the custom firmware WDLXTV, you can mount remote share through a USB flash drive to act like its a network drive but I don't think that's possible on the standard firmware

I do have my PC attached to the network and it's generally on all the time but I can't seem to include the files on the USB hard drive in my library for DLNA sharing.

Any suggestions?

Otherwise it might be time to box this one back up

mclean

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#1146754 3-Oct-2014 16:11

Seems complicated. Mine can see all the network shares without any help. Is the router set to allow anonymous access to the USB drive?

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659 posts

Ultimate Geek
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#1146758 3-Oct-2014 16:17

Seems to be a thing with the TP Link routers/modems in that the shared media doesn't have a name - you have to enter the ip address

With all the other brands I've used (Belkin, Linksys, Asus, DLink, Netgear) the USB storage shows up in the network when you scan it (either as netgear, router, asus, nasstorage etc...)

Changing from TP Link isn't an option unfortunately

To be honest I don't watch a lot of media on the tv these days (mostly on the tablet) so if I did want to watch something I could just transfer it to USB Flash drive and plug it into the telly instead

mclean

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#1146775 3-Oct-2014 16:30

Any reason why you can't move the drive to a local port on the WDTV?

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659 posts

Ultimate Geek
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#1147014 3-Oct-2014 23:06

mclean: Any reason why you can't move the drive to a local port on the WDTV?

Good point and something I'm considering.

At the moment the external HDD is plugged into the modem which is located next to my main PC.

The advantage of connecting it to the WDTV is that it physically separates the PC and HDD in the event I get burgled or (to some extent) fire damage so backups are more practical.

The downside is that my PC is connected to the HDD through a gigabit LAN - if I connect it to the WDTV then I'm limited to Wireless-N speeds for file transfers

I'll sleep on it