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!
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!
