Hello,

I got a WDTV Live a few days ago like many of people here, and have been having hell of a time streaming anything reliable from a CIFS share. Can see the shares and access them, and play something for a while, but then would disconnect and not discover shares again until a reboot, and this seems pretty common and hopefully will get updated soon with some firmware.

Anyways, after researching all that (monitoring opened shares on my Windows 2008 Server R2, login and logout attempts ect) I decided to try something different.

My initial concern is to get these devices working at my parents house, first and foremost, as they are the least technical people and can't deal with network disconnects ect. My original plan was to get a DNS-323 and throw it on their network and then connect 3 or 4 WDTV lives to the network in different rooms so that they can access central data anywhere they are, and that is still the plan, but I don't want to buy the DNS-323 + drive right now since money is tight. So here is what I tried. I connected a 1TB external USB hdd to one WDTV Live, and then connected a second WDTV Live in a different room. Since media sharing is enabled on the first WDTV, I can connect to that USB disk from any of my computers....but best of all, I can connect to the USB disk on the first WDTV Live, with my Second WDTV Live in a different room, and unlike CIFS shares, it just WORKS! No connection drops, nothing, works flawless, with the annonimous account that it defaults to!

So at the end of the day, I will have one WDTV Live sitting with a 1TB drive attached and always powered on, and then other WDTV Lives in other rooms all sharing one USB disk over the network! In the future I hope to buy the DNS-323 and use that. Anyone using DNS-323 successfully without network disconnects? I think that the network sharing problem that many people are having is strickly related to Windows and the way Windows does SAMBA, vs Linux variation, since WDTV to WDTV Network shares work perfectly fine!

Just hook it up by using NFS shares, Ciff/SMB will never be any good with voedio streaming. dont blame the wd tv, blame MS$ and wait for the firmware from b-rad to come out so that you can hook it up with NFS sharing in the mean time get a good nfs server for winddows like hanewin

Samba is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux and is commonly included as a basic system service on other Unix-based operating systems as well. Samba is released under the GNU General Public License. The name Samba comes from SMB (Server Message Block), the name of the standard protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system.
to stream large amounts of data requires more than just implementing a basic network share protocol. WD had plenty of time to test this device and/or integrate enhanced network QOS traffic practises. they didnt.

Just hook it up by using NFS shares, Ciff/SMB will never be any good with voedio streaming. dont blame the wd tv, blame MS$ and wait for the firmware from b-rad to come out so that you can hook it up with NFS sharing in the mean time get a good nfs server for winddows like hanewin

NFS doesn't yet work yet, so what is the point of getting NFS setup. I have read about b-rad and am paitiently waiting for a hacked firmware to come out.

Windows 2008 Server R2 has native NFS support, I tried it out but it doesn't work.

And I didn't blame WDTV...I blamed Microsoft OS since obviously it is working otherwise through Linux implementation.