Originally Posted by
eblend 
Anyone who is having network issues should really install b-rad's hacked firmware and use xmount. I like many have been batteling with wdtv live network share dropout problem and I tried everything imaginable to get it to work, yet it simply wouldn't. So what I did was I downloaded b-rad custom firmware version 1.07 and installed it. To get this to work you will need to constantly have a usb stick plugged in but at least this works, until WD fixes the issues. Actually this works even better then the network shares that are build in.
1. Download B-rads latest firmware
2. Flash the firmware into the player
3. Take a small sized usb key (I have a bunch of dell 512mb ones, but you can use the smallest available and will still work) and copy the net.mounts file to the USB key, it is found with the firmware package you download.
4. Open the net.mounts file and modify it to have the proper information for your CIFS shares (or NFS shares, instructions are included as comments in the net.mounts file)
For me, this is how my net.mounts file looks
xmount //192.168.0.185/All_Media Media cifs user=wdtvlive,pass=mypassword (can ommit user and password entries if using annon)
5. Place the USB key into the WDTV live and power it on. Once it is powered on and the usb light is solid on the front, navigate to Videos/Local Drives/USB2 (or 1) and open it.
6. If you got the right syntax in your net.mounts folder, all of your files will appear as it they were on the actual usb thumbdrive! (on first boot sometimes it takes about 30 seconds for the drives to appear as there is a sleep value set on xmount to ensure it establishes a connection). From here on you can browse all of your network media as if it was local to the small sized usb drive you have plugged in! The benefits of this vs a network share (which has all the dropout problems) is that, for one, NO Dropouts!! I watched like 3 movies since and works perfect, and benefit number 2 is that unlike network shares, thumbnails work just as if they were local to the usb key, so if you named your thumbnails exact same as the movie name, the actual movie file will carry the thumbnail without the extra thumbnail file being visible! So simply name your thumbnails same as the movie and the thumbnail will appear for the folder view, and once again as the image of the MKV file! If you want to have a thumbnail for a general category like Movies, you can also place a file called folder.jpg into the movies directory and that thumbnail will become your folder icon, without the actual jpg file being visible in the tree.
Hope this helps someone, was super easy to setup and it worked for me right away! Hope this helps you guys out until wd releases proper firmware to fix the issues, but even if they do I wouldn't go back to using the network shares option since the thumbnails do not work as well as they do on local disks
with my Live - After waiting over a month to track one of these down it died after two days with a flashing power light 
and I have effectively lost these files now - thankfully I have backups.
