Hi all, Ok... I bought this yesterday and I am totally stumped now. If anyone can help me I will be eternally grateful! I bought a WD TV Live and connected it to my TV via HDMI and my router via ethernet. It was updated to the latest firmware and powered on. My PC has four hard drives - an OS and three others with films on in video_ts format. I cannot get the WD TV Live to see the other three drives no matter what I do, let alone see the films in the drives. I have ensured the Workgroup names match. I have turned off password protected sharing. I have enabled sharing of video via the Homegroup window. I have manually enabled 'Change' permissions and sharing on the drives themselves as well as the parent film folder on each drive. On my PC the WDTV Live shows on the Network sidebar but not in the Homegroup section. On the WDTV the only folders that show after searching for Windows Shares is the Default and Users folders that come on the OS drive, which have no media in because it's all on the other drives. Pleeeeease can someone help? I have followed the manual to the letter, I have scoured the internet til my eyes bled and I cannot understand where I am going wrong?
Yep, install a media server application on your PC. This will 'broadcast' your media to all uPnP renderers, such as the wdtv live. I use TwonkyMedia, others are available. Cleggy.
I eventually managed to get it to play the media, although the films all stutter after about 10 seconds and lose their sound... They stream fine to my laptop however. Do you think this PS3 server would cure that?
I'd run a media server and see, they all come with a free trial and many are free for life. The other benefit is that you could then use another controller, iPhone for example, to navigate and play your collection. PlugPlayer is a good, cheap uPnP control point for iOs devices.
Not sure why you are having this issue. I have network and drive shares set up on my server and it just finds them by doing Video > Network Shares > 'My server name' Then i enter my username and password and it displays my shared folders. I have tried it with a media server running before, but found my server (only powered by an Atom chip) couldn't convert on the fly fast enough and i got the stuttering you have referred to. Not sure if your server is also (therefore) not up the workload.
Iirc, you switch media streaming off (or media streaming over homegroup.. something like that), bizarelly enough. I had a similar experience to you in that I was trying to figure out which video folder was actually sharing over the network from my whs2011 server. My PS3 could see the server but found no files. It wasn't until I switched streaming off that the PS3 then found the files I'd put into the shared folder. Weird, but it worked 100% after that - streamed just fine over my wireless g/54bhp network.
Hi all, It was possibly the enabling streaming to be on that was preventing the WD from seeing any media, and this was corrected but all the video_ts files were stuttering. It definitely wasn't a performance issue as the connection was hard wired and my pc is a 2500K overclocked to 4.6ghz with 8gb of 1.6ghz RAM and an overclocked 560Ti. After some research it appears that the issue may reside with the WD itself, and some reluctance to play video_ts files correctly with the current firmware. Converting the video_ts files to .iso using something like imgburn enables the player to play all files perfectly. Bizarre.
I didn't have that issue with mine, though for a couple of years I've been streaming video as MKV as its easier to manage. Would recommend checking out MakeMKV, a free program to covert just about anything to the MKV container.
I must admit to loving handbrake now I've found some decent settings for it. I load it up with a queue last thing and leave it overnight - takes about an hour per movie. Badaboom 2 is also good, encodes to mp4 in around ten minutes on my 560ti448 but I haven't figured out how to build a queue in it yet, if it's possible. I wonder if the wdtv's output MB/s is limited in some way?
I cant imagine its output is limited - it can quite happily receive and display HD content, and Im only streaming SD content at present. Really the most important thing for me is my content has absolutely no degradation in the original quality at all. This is my absolute deal breaker on file packaging and coding. I couldn't care less how large a space the media occupies as long as it suffers no loss.
