WD TV Live - Mac users only

I stream wirelessly from my Macbook Pro to my classic WDTV (with WLxTV firmware). Works great with an NFS share. (On the Mac I set it up manually in Tiger, used NFS Manager in Leopard). The WDTV requires an NFS app.bin and a simple addition to the net.mounts file. I don't know much about Linux and it was easy.

I also have the wdtv live and have some issues (snow leopard). My current setup uses Playon through a Vista PC, but I am unable to see my imac. The iMac symbol shows up on the wdtv, but when I select it, it says no files found. Then on the iMac, the WDTV pops up in finder under shared drives. However when I try to select the WDTV, it asks for a login/password and none of my logins work. I am thinking I have something in sharing/networrking setup incorrectly.

I'd really like to skip the Vista computer (it's my kids' computer) and just stream from my iMac instead. Hints? Suggestions? Can I use Plex to stream with my Mac?

@marc4sgr, it would be great if you do post the information about setting up sharing on a Mac. My iMac sees the Live after I futzed around with sharing, and I think I played a file on the iMac through the Live. I really have not spent enough time to figure it out. Any information would be really helpful.

I have been pleasantly surprised with the WD TV Live after playing around with it and the CinemaTube for the past several days. I have an iMac attached to a diy unRAID server and have been able to stream 720p videos flawlessly to my TV via powerline adapters. Have seen some stuttering with 1080p, but the stuttering seems to disappear as the videos keep playing (go figure).

Was trying to figure a way out to stream Hulu to the WD TV Live, but have been unable to find a good solution thus far. Have heard that tversity and PlayOn may work through PC emulation, but wanted something native to mac os. PS3 media server has a mac os build that is easy to use and served up all drives attached to my iMac without having to set anything up. I can confirm that it will play 1080p videos using this method. Problem is that I have not found a way to serve Hulu to the TV using this program.

etbull - I have shared your same experiences trying to connect the mac and WD TV Live directly (ie not through PS3 media server). Although I have to admit that I have not really tried playing around with it in any detail. Just know that it doesn't seem to work 'out of the box'.

So far, I am happy with the WD TV Live. It doesn't compare to Plex or XBMC, but I haven't been able to find another device that streams 1080p for the price and reasonable interface.

marc4sgr, it would be great if you could post your setup info. Do you have snow leapord? Do you stream Hulu to your tv, if so, what program do you use?

Everyone who's having issues sharing from your Mac, please make sure you go to your System Preferences on your Mac, then Sharing. Click the box next to "File Sharing" & also the one next to "Windows Sharing". Be sure to look under the options in that box & share your actual password protected user account or else it wont work.

If you're using Leopard or Snow Leopard, I think that "Windows Sharing" option doesnt have its own check box in the main sharing list in the system preferences & its buried under the regular "File Sharing" options. Just enable that & you'll be fine & will be streaming like a champ to your WD TV. (It may require a restart of your router, not sure).

Also, those wishing to connect from your Mac to the WD TV that you can see listed in the Finder under your shares cant do that because there's nothing to connect to. Remember, the WD TV doesnt have an internal hard drive, so just because the unit is listed there doesnt mean you can connect to it. There's nothing to connect to.

However, if you have a usb hard drive attached to the WD TV unit, that drive should show up & you should be able to connect & mount that drive on your Mac over the network. Then, you can copy files to it as well.

Lemme know how all this goes for you guys. But it should work & is very simple to enable. I think OS X oversimplifies things a lot & people tend to overlook options or think there's more to it than what there really is. But it totally works outta the box 100% with the WD TV.

P.S. Yes, it would be awesome if someone found a way to stream Hulu or Netflix from Mac to the WD TV & do it natively (screw using Parallels & doing it through Windows). That would make me a very happy nerd.

BTW, Mac users. Just an FYI, Orb is now available for Mac as well & works with the WD TV beautifully. What it does is stream out your iTunes & iPhoto library as a share so you can see it on your WD TV. I tried it & it works great. I was streaming my iTunes all day yesterday.

Peace.

I have my 2008 iMac seeing the Live and can play videos from my computer attached drives very nicely. I have noticed 2 glitches, however.
1) Two of my HDD's (both in one enclosure) have disappeared from the Sharing screen of the iMac and, although listed on the Live cannot access any content. Adding the drives to Sharing makes them Drive 01-1 and Drive 02-1 and I can then play content from them. But I now have 4 HDD's instead of 2 showing up on the Live.
2) As noted by others, under Network Shares I now have the movie icons appearing in the list of content by themselves and also as the movies themselves. When the drive is attached directly to the Live this does not happen. Hopefully a software update will fix that.
All in all, I am very pleased with this unit as it does what I want it to do. I only use it for videos as I stream my music through an Airport Express to an AV Receiver in my living room. This is a great little box.

1. I bet the problem is the fact that you have 2 drives in 1 enclosure. Sounds like the Mac & the WD TV are seeing them differently. Try it with 2 different enclosures or take one of the drives out of the current enclosure & then restart everything.

2. I havent encountered this problem so its hard to say. If I can replicate it, I'll try to let you know what I find out.

I was leaning towards that as I saw that all the drives in single enclosures are showing up properly. Guess what I'll do is connect the dual-drive enclosure directly to the Live and leave the singles on the iMac. As far as double jpg's go, it happens with both Mac OSX and Windows using Network Shares. Most of the other problems reported on the forum have to do with Windows. Good to see that there is a thread for Mac users.
Thanks for the reply.

I just found this thread and it seems there's a ton of good info on here. I've been looking at getting one or two of these to put videos/shows in an easy to connect box to our TVs for the wife. She has trouble setting her macbook up to the TV to placate the kids ...

Anyways, I have a few questions ...


Having an option for Hulu would be great. I saw that PlayOn thing and it looks good, although the thought of paying has soured me a little. (yeah call me ungrateful)


I've read somewhere that transfer rates when writing to a HDD connected to the WDTV Live is very slow. Can you confirm this?


Thanks for the tip. Does Orb play iTS protected music?

One last question ... if I connect a small 2.5" USB hard drive to the WDTV, would turning off the WDTV also turn off the HDD?

I just tried it with a typical 2.5" sata drive in an enclosure hooked up to the WDTV. I partitioned the drive with OS X's Disk Utility before I connected it using Master Boot Record FAT 32 (MS-DOS).

After it was connected, mounting it over the network was as easy as just looking in the Finder window & clicking on the WDTV & then the drive's name. It took less than a minute to copy a 1.3 GB movie file over to the drive, so thats not too shabby. Keep in mind though that Im not using WiFi, so my Mac & the WDTV is all connected to the router via ethernet. Im sure WiFi (especially G speeds) would be slower. But Im sure its still quite doable & not too bad.


You're welcome. No, unfortunately, Orb is simply setting up your iTunes & iPhoto libraries as shares, so its streaming straight from whatever files you have in them. Meaning there's no transcoding or anything like that. So it wont play anything protected.

I personally have stripped off all that nasty iTunes DRM long ago though & freed my tunes. It was so limiting. Even any video I happen to buy in iTunes (which isnt many) I'll use a screen recording app to "hijack" the video stream & then convert it on the fly into a useable format. Comes out really decent actually & retains the quality nicely.

Oh, and yes. The drive will shut off when you turn off the WDTV.

Hey i'm looking to buy a wireless usb network adapter to attach to the wdtv live, which will be able to be seen by my mac book pro so i can transfer files wirlessly to the USb attached to the wdtvlive. Can any wireless G usb adapter work....i've seen the list which all have N capabilities, but will G work also? Trying to just get a cheap one, since i'm really not streaming anything. Can anyone suggest any known working ones....outside of the compatibility list?

thanks
V

Thanks for the help. I use my Airport express to stream my itunes, but will check out Orb for my photo sharing.

Hi all, hope someone can help.
WDTV Live set up just fine and can stream media through my WD MyBook, through media server option (not through network share).
Would like to stream and manage files sometimes from my Macbook- can't fathom how to get it to work. WDTV Live is showing as shared on my Macbook but when I go to WDTV Live I am not sure if I can see the laptop - only the MyBook and another thing with a long name of letters and numbers...also no problem with local drive as a USB pen drive turns up on the WDLIve and as a share on the Macbook...

Can anybody help? Have file sharing turned on and samba enabled...what am I doing wrong, or not done??

Any ideas gratefully received!! Or a 'talk me through it' tutorial
Thanks in advance

I'm not sure what finally got it to work but I did this after trying over and over:

I set a folder with my videos in it up for sharing on my Mac Pro - under "sharing" and then "shared folders". I clicked on that shared folder so it was highlighted and then I set up a new user right beside it in Sharing and gave it a short name and a short password. I gave that new user read only permission. I clicked on it and then right clicked on it and selected "apply permissions to enclosed items". I went to the WDTV Live and typed in that user name and password and my connection worked! I am streaming videos from the folder I selected for sharing.

I put in a lot of time last weekend first setting up a new network with a Belkin N wireless router. I could not get either the router or the WDTV to set up automatically to start with. Unfortunately it took a lot of trial and error time and a number of fruitless calls to Belkin and Western Digital, both with excellent response times but very little useful information at least for the Mac.

I am running the latest system - OS X 10.5.8

When I used the network "easy install" from Belkin, it for some reason set up through an old "appletalk" network I had for serial connections, rather than the intended ethernet. I could connect, but continuously lost the connection and couldn't see the WDTV. The WDTV Live was able to access the internet (YouTube etc.) with its "Easy Setup".
The computer connection to the internet was solved by creating a new "Location" in the network System Preferences without an available appletalk option and running the Belkin Easy Setup again.

However, I was still not seeing my iMac on the WDTV. I didn't realize that the type of connection referred to as SMB under "options" in sharing on the Mac is apparently a short form for Samba in the WDTV manual. Activating this way of sharing made my iMac visible on the WDTV

At this point I was on the internet from both machines, I could see a hard drive I had connected to the WDTV Live from my iMac, I could see the iMac on the WDTV Live, but even though I had apparently activated all the "sharing buttons" in System Preferences, I could not see the contents of my iMac drive.

The way I eventually found that made my drive and folders available to the WDTV after activating "Sharing" was to select a drive or folder in the finder that you want to see and then Right Click or under File "Get Info". In the middle of the pane you will see a check box for "Shared Folder". Check this box. At the bottom of this pane you will see Sharing & Permissions. and probably a locked padlock symbol in the lower right corner. Unlock the pane with your password, if necessary. There should be a some selections under name. Make these as you wish and the type of privileges. I assume that you would have to give "Read & Write" privileges to a name, if you wish to change your computer drive(s) from the WDTV Live screen. At the bottom center of the pane, you will find a "Gear" wheel. Selecting this will give you the option to "Apply changes to the enclosed items". It will probably give you a warning that you cannot undo your changes. I am not sure if this is true or not, but what other choice do you have, short of going in and individually doing this to every file and folder inside the one you are working on. This very quickly gives you access to just the folders you want to be able to see on the WDTV.

I hope this tale may help someone with their setup.

Thanks to everyone else here who gave me some hints along the way.

was hoping i could get some advice for my planned set up.

currently, i've got a leopard 10.5.8 desktop with a 1 tb external HD that has all my video content, connected w/ ethernet wires to my N-router. in the living room, i have the WD TV live with N-usb adaptor. currently, i only have occasional problems streaming 1080p content from my desktop to the living room, with stuttering occurring usually when the computer is doing some work.

in my bedroom, i have an xbox 360 with g-wireless adaptor that i use to stream non-hd content over to the tv i have in there. while the 360 does a good job streaming these videos, it is limited in the types of media files it can read.

this would be my ideal set up:
living room: wd tv live with attached external HD containing 1080p, 720p, and standard media.
bedroom: 2nd wd tv live, no external HD, streams media from the external HD on the living room wd tv live.
office: mac desktop, use to copy media to living room external hd via wifi-N.

is this possible? will the 2nd unit be able to stream from the 1st unit's attached HD? kinda don't want to buy another unit unless it can do that.

of course, i know that i could just leave the HD on my mac, and have both units streaming from it. however, i'd like to be able to turn off my computer whenever i'm not using it, and i figure that leaving on the living room unit to stream to the bedroom would conserve more electricity than leaving my desktop on to stream, no?

thanks for any help.

Hi All,

No sure if this is an active thread anymore -

however set up my new WD HD live media box and its fine - but it can't find my Macbook - yes turned on users sharing and Samba but still not joy - did a hard rest and network reset - no joy -

Any help anywhere please?

Would like to hear if you were successful - several reports at ORB forum where it only picks up one photo from thousands.

Doing it to me as well.

Hello,

Hopefully someone can assist...

After enjoying an (old) WDTV for over a year I switched to WDTVLive. Goal is to access the exsisting HD content at several locations.

I have connected the WDTVLive to my network. Firmware update 1.02.21.

My HD (already used on previous WDTV) is connected to an Airport Express new version, so connected to the network. I can see the HD on all connected computers, also through Wifi and play the content (VideoTS) in DVD-Player.

I can also see connected computers on the WDTVLive and access shared content. You Tube also works.

Problem: If my HD (LaCie 2TB) is not used it switches to stand-by. When I start WDTVLive it will not see the HD, probably because it is in standby. I can activate the HD with any computer though and when the HD is running it sometimes is suddenly is recognised by the HDTVLive. The last few attempts however have been unsuccessfull....

AE does see the WDTVLive, can bee seen in the logfiles.

Question: Does anyone know how the WDTVLive, when powered up, can signal the standby HD to wake up and be detected? And how the settings are supposed to be?

Thanks a million in advance for your tips and help.

HB

Hi everybody - I wasn't sure if I should've started a new thread. I just started using WDTV HD Live Plus. I have a USB NTFS formatted drive connected to it. I can write to it from my PC but not from the Mac. I have Paragon NTFS for OSX installed on the Mac and I have been able to write to NTFS formatted drives, as a matter of fact I have Windows Home Server with NTFS formatted drive that I constantly copy files to from my Mac. Level II tech support didn't have the answer and will research it. Anybody else having this issue?

In case you're wondering why I'm using NTFS instead of FAT32 - there is a file size limitation of 4Gig on FAT32.

On the forums I've been reading a lot from PC users networked to WD HD Live but have yet to see discussions of how Mac users are using their WD HD Live. Would be great if we could share information. So let me start...

I love my WD HD Live as it does everything it says it does. I was able to get iPhoto working by connecting to the iPhoto Library on the Network Preference Pane/SMB by selecting the Library and control+click> "Show Package Contents" and added (dragged) the modified photos folder to the SMB sharing window. My best experience is using the media server Yazsoft's Playback which greatly improved large MKV and TS HD files. A good deal for $15 bucks--really improved the experience. It only supports one iPhoto Library and won't transcode my years of DV files. It also doesn't have Hulu or Netflix. Would be nice to have the PC server PlayOn or TVersity ported to the Mac. I'd pay $50 for a copy of those. What are other people using? any problems? or what has been your experience using the Mac with WD HD Live

Can you tell me exactly what Playback does to improve the experience? Why not just point the WD TV live at the files you want to play?

Hi Guys!
I have a problem with my WD tv Live network share. My WD is connected to ethernal cabel and it works on youtube and everything on my WD, but i can`t connect it to my Macbook pro. WD finds my mac and my mac finds WD, but when i go to network shares on WD and finds my Mac it asks for account and password, when i have typed it in it comes up: "This network share can not be accessed". You know what to do ?

Hi all, I really hope I get a reply as I see this thread has been going a while... I have the WDTV HD LIVE (obviously why I'm here) connected to my imac via ethernet, and while i was using old 1.02 FW i had an account made for it called WDTV with a password set up for it and it was running smoothly, every file would play pretty instantly, had no problem with 1080p mkv's over 12gb even, but then i tried to watch season 6 of lost and OH NO! 1.02 FW did not have the support for the audio... now I've updated to the latest 1.05.something FW and when i connect using this account it just says "there is not media in the current folder"... I haven't changed any settings! WTF!? I can however connect using my imac's login username and password, but it then tries to load my entire computer instead of just my external HDD's. I wouldn't mind this except for some stupid reason when i play any mkv file it plays instantly, regardless of size, but i have to let the WDTV load on the network for over 3 hours if i want to play a measly 150mb avi... otherwise it just stutters as though im trying to stream a 10gb 1080p through a G speed wifi router... So my thinking is that if i can get my WDTV username and password login to work again it will only need to load my HDD's and therefore everything will work instantly...? It may be some other reason it is so slow but as i stated before, any mkv file regardless of size is instant playback, whereas avis, wmvs, mpegs all stutter way too much. PLEASE HELP! This has been frustrating me for weeks! I also do not leave it constantly turned on and connected because i only have my TV and home theatre, ps3 and xbox and WDTV turned on when using them, so i save more power and my energy bills are as low as possible... Someone please reply WD has been no help to me, thank you in advance!

Hi
Hopefully this thread isn't too old- I have the same problem, did you manage to solve it?

Just got a WD TV Live and a WD 2TB drive last week at Best Buy. Been using it with no problems.

Connected the drive to the WD TV. Connected the WD TV to my projector and network via power line ethernet connection. Turned everything on and my Mac saw the WD hard drive and I was able to drag drop media files in finder with no problems.

I also have a Playstation 3 in another room. I had previously installed Medialink on my mac. It's a media server written to support the PS3. The WD TV recognized Medialink and I was able to stream media from the Mac. Played my movies and iTunes stuff just fine, playlists too.

I am having same issue... imac 5, updated firmware on old wd tv live, have all sharing and smb options checked but still cant access shared network?? please help...