WD TV Live keeps losing network shares

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
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dmbottawa wrote:

wdlive76 wrote:

 

Honestly, I think the WD TV Live is a great device.  It is very user friendly. Hard to break. And very customizable.  Compared to competitor products, there is nothing that has the flexibility of playing local content better than this device.

 

And there lies the problem…  "User Friendly. Hard to Break"

 

That’s not why we bought it to begin with. It’s advertised to Stream Media wirelessly via a network but the experience is SO POOR that I don’t know why anyone would bother trying.

 

 

“there is nothing that has the flexibility of playing local content better than this device.”

 

Sure, if you can get it to work wirelessly  for more than a couple days at a time. If you hard wire the device it’s not so bad but we don’t all have that option. And please don’t tell me about workarounds… no device should force end users to start messing with Master Browser settings, router settings, firmware downgrades etc… just for the thing to work! It should work from get-go, period.

 

In the end, it’s a decent device but certainly flawed in many ways. Would I buy another, not a chance.

I’ve never had any of the problems you are talking about. For me the device has performed exactly as advertized.  I’ve used it wirelessly for over a year without any issues. Recently i switched to wired simply to get faster throughput. 

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Hi all,

I’m also having a frustrating issue with network shares, hoping someone has a suggestion to try:

Background:

  1. WDTV Live SMP gen. 3 I bought used ~6 months ago; it had and still has firmware 2.01.86 on it.

  2. WDTV is used only to stream video files of various types from LAN network shares.

  3. Files are on a Mac, which shares them out using both AFP and SMB.

  4. WDTV connected to LAN wirelessly on 802.11n network. Router is a  high capacity Asus RT-N66U; Fileserver Mac is attached to same router.

  5. Initial discovery and connection to the network shares from the WDTV always works (although a bit slower than from a computer, ~20secs instead of 2-3), and browsing and streaming videos starts fine, however:

  6. About once every hour of streaming on average (variance is considerable), streaming will interrupt with the “source no longer available” error message. At this point, the WDTV will no longer see any network shares;

  7. Using the the network test option will report that it’s connected to the router and the correct IP address (the WDTV gets a pre-allocated static DHCP address). However, the only way to get it to see the network shares again is to re-scan for wireless networks, manually select the SSID and re-enter the SSID passphrase, and then manually re-browse network shares. Power cycling  the WDTV doesn’t help. Sometimes even re-doing the network scan isn’t enough, and the router needs to be rebooted.

Interestingly, Once the file whose streaming was interrupted is accessed again, the WDTV does recognize that it was interrupted (even if it had been power-cycled), and is capable of resuming from the interrupted point.

  1. This sounds like it isn’t the same issue some folks were encountering earlier in this thread, since it doesn’t require a Windows share to happen.

None of the below factors make any difference:
– Whether the WDTV is accessing the files as a Mac (AFP) share or Windows (SMB) share (and I’ve tried disabling one sharing method on the Mac and only accessing via the other)

– Two different Macs, one running OS X 10.6, the other 10.8

– Whether the Mac is connected to the router via wired gigabit, WiFi 2.4GHz 802.11n or WiFi 5GHz 802.11

– Whether there is any other traffic on the WiFi or gigabit wired LAN

– The size, resolution, & type of the video file/codec (happens with AVI, MKV, MPG); happens with 480p files as well as larger formats.

After the WDTV has disconnected,  other devices (other computer, tablet, etc.) have no problems accessing the same shares & files, so it’s not a simple (W)LAN issue; I doubt this is a router issue… This router is used for some extremely heavy workloads (only gets rebooted once every few months), and I’ve never had issues with multi-100-GB file copies across these file shares.

This is extremely frustrating – I have two 6-y.o. twins, and the main purpose of the WDTV is streaming LAN content for them (I don’t keep a TV in the house, just a projector attached to the WDTV). I now have to take into account 10-20min of futzing with settings and angry kids every time they want to watch a couple of cartoons.

The problem has been there ever since I got the WDTV, but I’m only tackling it now.

Anyone have any ideas? Particularly someone who’s using a Mac for the network shares.

– I’m willing to downgrade firmware if someone has a specific version they can recommend.

– Not willing to run any kind of media server software on the Mac. That goes against the KISS approach of having a streamer in the firs tplace, and the overhead IME is considerable (the Mac is a work machine as well)

– Willing to do a moderate amount of network traffic / protocol analysis if it’ll help & someone cna point me what/how to look for.

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Suggestion #1: upgrade your firmware to 2.02.32. For me, that’s when all these “network drop” issues stopped.

My other suggestions would be largely impossible. Me, I’m hard-wired to a Windows computer. Or was, no I’m hard-wired to an unRAID server. Or, rather, I’m hard-wired to the router, so the media source doesn’t really matter I suppose. Either way, physical wires for me to curse, instead of invisible WLAN demons.

I’ve had the “source no longer available” issue plenty of times, but not recently. I’ll get the occasional fudge-up which requires a hard restart, but nothing near the problems I dealt with on 2.01.86.

So yeah, in my limited experience and expertise all I can recommend is upgrade that firmware. It took way too long to come about, but it fixed 90% of my issues (or 100% of them, giving me more free time to find new ones).

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CasanovaFly,
Thanks!
Encouraging that 2.02.32 helped in your case – I’ll try that first, since IIRC, I can downgrade back later if I need to, right?

Re your other suggestions:
Eventually, I plan on having a NAS-based fixed fileserver (probably Synology) anyway – the forementioned Mac is a laptop intended for work, with the media files on 8TB of FireWire and USB3 media drives, so it’s not an elegant setup.

I hadn’t actually been planning to use WiFi at all (don’t like the inconsistent performance), but running CAT5 through walls to the WDTV is an issue here (rented apt.). I actually got a pair of 600mbps powerline Ethernet transceivers, only to  find out throughput was really horrible, much worse than WiFi.

I didn’t expect WiFi to cause drops, just throughput issues for HD files, but as a former network chip architect, I should have been less trusting…

I will probably rearrange my whole setup not to rely on WiFi eventually, but in the meantime hope the firmware will be a quick fix.

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Yes, you can downgrade. There is ample information somewhere on WD’s site about how to carry it out.

When I was living in a rented house a while back, I bought 100ft of ethernet cable and ran it from the router upstairs to my Xbox on the floor below. No excuses. Hardwired4life.

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SOLVED!!! I’ve been messing around with my WDTV for since I got the thing because it kept losing “Media Share” connection. I’ve been all over the net and seen that this has been a real pain in the neck for lots of people. Most of the information you get for solutions revolve around resetting OS dialogue check boxes etc. (which you should check to be sure you’re set up properly). HOWEVER… there is a simple solution to watching all of your media on your WDTV live from your PC. For every folder you have that contains your movie or other media RIGHT CLICK the folder and select INCLUDE IN LIBRARY… the rest is self explanatory. Now just watch over NETWORK SHARES in stead of trying to force everything through MEDIA SERVER. Enjoy… :slight_smile: