WDTV Live can't see network shares - only when we want to use it

Hello

I have a WD Live and the firmware is up to date. It is set up to access the home network via wifi. The main PC is Windows 7 Ultimate and a Homegroup is set up to serve media to other devices in the household including a Windows 7 laptop, an Android Tablet and the WD Live connected to the LG TV.

On setup of the WDTV Live, the network password and the Windows share password were entered and all has been working when it does. I never know from one day to the next if the bloody thing can see the network shares. I checked the other devices obn the network and they can connect with the shared folders with no problem. Is the WDTV Live wanting something special from the network I don’t know about? I don’t want to reboot everything each time we want to watch a movie, or is this the way it is supposed to work? I know that saying that just opened the door for responders to blame the PC or my network. There is NOTHING wrong with them. Everything else works just fine.

I have factory reset it twice and set it up again from scratch. The only thing I thought it couls be is a stand-by power saving power board we use. Must the device always be on stand-by power? It will be bad form for WD if this is the case.

The WDTV Live will be going back to the store for a refunf if this can’t be resolved. I know Western Digital make fabulous hard drives, so I find it hard to believe they would make a product that is a piece of **bleep**.

tamxir

When you shutdown the WDTV try doing a “full power off” by holding the off button for 5 seconds.  Takes a bit longer to startup but I suspect it will find your shares most every time. If you have Media Library enabled it just wont be able to do scans for changes while off.  May or may not be important for you.

Thanks for the quick reply  Braumeister.

I’ll give that a try when I can. I am not at home at the moment.  I will add that I also have PLEX Media server running as well as the Win 7 PC set to stream media. The WDTV Live has no problems seeing those, but my partner prefers a straight forward folder list than the ‘more button pressing’ to get to the desired content. I am not interested in it scanning the media library. I am happy with the way PLEX does that and am actively seeking an alternate TV solution that can use the PLEX server metadata which I am very happy with on my XBMC setup on my other netwok devices. The WDTV Live is the only one failing to co-operate. I would REALLY like a PLEX client on the WDTV box, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon.

tamxir

PS - What? I just tried to post this.

‘Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and submit the message when you are satisfied.’

  

This forum isn’t very disabled friendly. First, I get discriminated against when I try to sign in as I am visually impaired. I CAN’T SEE to Enter only the BLACK characters. I’m lucky to just SEE them, let alone detect their colour. I have the browser colours inverted. I had to get someone to sign in for me. Now the editor is accusing me of using HTML when all I did is type. I’m sorry, I have low tolerance for things that don’t work EASILY. End Rant :slight_smile: I had a bad day. Sorry, off topic.

Some ideas for you:

WD recommends turning off the Win 7 Homegroup when using a WDTV and only use Network Shares.  (see their knowledge base).

There could be a “master browser” issue, (A What?)  Yea, so see this link and d/l the cool free program for finding master browser.  How to Determine the Master Browser in a Windows Workgroup  

You want your main PC to be the MB, and if it is turned off for a while and then back on, the network can get confused and take a while to recover.

Don’t sweat the HTML error msg – you pasted the guy’s name in your msg and it was an HTML link.  Whatever; this happens often, just hit post again.

>>>  This forum isn’t very disabled friendly. First, I get discriminated against when I try to sign in as I am visually impaired.

Me, too – I just have one eye working the past few years, and it is fading fast, but I still hang in there.  This forum is lots better than most for me, and I always bump the browser view size up from 100% to 125% and it improves the situation for this site and many other forum sites.

tamxir - the invalid HTML thing happens to us all, in your case it was probably something to do with your copy and paste of Braumeister which appears as a link in your post.

Thank you mike27oct and richUK for your comments. Yes, I can understand the reason for the HTML error now, I did paste in the original responders name.

I never heard of a master browser. I quote…

"What happens is that all the computers on your LAN hold an “election”. This election depends on a number of factors, but for the purposes of this discussion, we just have to know that all the computers get together and vote on who will be the Master Browser on the LAN. Once a computer is elected, it will keep track of what machines are connected to the LAN by more or less sending messages to say, “Yo! You still there?”

The problem was that my network is a dictatorship run by ME and I take no prisioners :slight_smile: I disabled Homegroup with a sense of satisfaction because I never did see the point of it. It turns out the Win 7 Laptop was the ‘Master Browser’ somehow. That little Coup d’état has come to a grinding halt :slight_smile:

I don’t know how but the WDTV Live is now master browser for the moment anyway… I’ll let it enjoy the power trip for a while :slight_smile:

Local Area Connection:
Node IpAddress: [192.168.0.2] Scope Id:

NetBIOS Remote Machine Name Table

Name Type Status

WDTVLIVE <00> UNIQUE Registered
WDTVLIVE <03> UNIQUE Registered
WDTVLIVE <20> UNIQUE Registered
…__MSBROWSE__.<01> GROUP Registered
WORKGROUP <1D> UNIQUE Registered
WORKGROUP <1E> GROUP Registered
WORKGROUP <00> GROUP Registered

MAC Address = 00-00-00-00-00-00

Anyway, it now works and I trhank you very much mike27oct. I do apologize for being crabby - my vision loss has caused me to lose patience quite quickly these days. I can’t see to fix things like I used to. I use Chrome browser with zoom plus the excellent ‘High Contrast’ extension to invert colours of most web pages so I can read them.

Also thanks richUK.

tamxir

@tamxir

A lot of us never heard about the master browser either; until we got a WD player! 

Anyway, my Win 7 is my preferred master browser, but with mutiple PCs in the house going on and off, things can get screwed up sometimes, so knowing about the master browser helped understand why my shares for the WD would get bunged up sometimes.  Turning off other gadgets and PCs that hijacked the master browser throne helps things get back to normal again.  Here is my screen shot showing all is normal by using Scottie’s free lanscan program and with minimal gadgets turned on.  My Win 7 PC rules the LAN and can stay that way until I do something to make it loose its rank (like put it to sleep, hibernate or turn off).

Lanscan Capture.JPG

Also, I fully understand how your poor vision can make one grumpy – poor vision is not fun!

Thanks again mike27oct.

I’ll follow your advice regarding the Master Browser thing. Just one more factoid I wish I didn’t have to know.

tamxir

STILL Unresolved

Problems finding Network shares

I have a wireless network consisting of a Windows 7 PC connected to a wireless modem/router via network cable and a Windows 7 Laptop connected wirelessly, as well as various Android phones and Tablets connected wirelessly.

I was having problems with getting the WDTV Live (connected wirelessly) to see the Windows shares on the server PC where all the content is. I was advised variously to alter certain ‘features’ of the Windows 7 network in order to accommodate the WDTV’s inability to understand windows shares. I disabled Homegroup as instructed with limited success due to a previously unheard of ‘Problem’ I never knew I had called ‘Master Browser’.

OK fine. Then I was advised to poke around in my PC and laptops registries, in what I can only described as a hack, and not a real solution to the problem. The WDTV Live was finding the Windows shares one day fine and not the next. The laptop was continuously asking for a network password. I had to reboot the server PC just about every time I wanted to watch something. My partner has no tolerance for things that don’t ‘just work’ and was telling me to get rid of the piece of excrement.

OK, I disabled the browser service in the laptop and pot in a batch file at bootup to sign into the wireless network, put some commonly used share shortcuts on the deskstop as it can’t see the network otherwise now. Yey! The WDTV Live was seeing the network share just fine for a few weeks. Until yesterday. How else can I degrade the functionality of my home network to accommodate the shortcomings of the WDTV box?

I’m not in the mood for some fanboy telling me there is something wrong with my network - THERE IS NOT! Whoever answers me had better choose their words very carefully and offer me a solution that is NOT a hack, I consider any poking around in the Windows registry as a HACK. I will NOT be connecting the WDTV Live to my network via cable. It is advertised as being .WIRELESS and that is what I paid for.

Yes the Firmware is up to date, yes Windows is up to date as is every other **bleep** thing that somehow gets CRITICALLY vital and a security risk if it is more than a week old. What a joke. They must hire incompetent programmers who can’t get it right the first time. No, I’m not going to go search the forum for some obscure answer. I’m visually impaired so typing this is hard enough for me.

In short, you will tell me how to get the **bleep** thing working without insulting my intelligence or blaming my Windows or network setup that ALL other devices here have never had an issue with connecting to or streaming media from my DLNA server or Windows shares. You also had better be very convincing what I should not scrp this WDTV Live as the piece of useless junk it looks like at the moment.

tamxir

PS I should also make a discrimination complaint about this site while I’m at it. I am colour blind and visually impaired, so signing in here required help from another person as I could not get past the inane login security scheme. I would drop Western Digital altogether if they didn’t make such good hard drives. Everything else they do seems fairly poor.

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You should remember that this is a user to user forum so its no good trying to threaten us or tell us what we can or cannot post in reply to your problem. I understand your frustration but its not our fault.

tamxir wrote:

I’m not in the mood for some fanboy telling me there is something wrong with my network - THERE IS NOT! 

Since you’ve got it all figured out already, enjoy!

Hi tamxir, please check your private messages. 

@tamxir

I tried to help you with this early on, and would try again, but since I think there just might be something wrong in your network, I’ll take a pass.  Meanwhile, let us know if the help offered to you from WD support rep gets some positive results.

Why should I check my private messages. I don’t care. Because of my poor vision, I have a hard enough time getting past the color-blind unfriendly security junk to sign in, let alone taking a course in PM hunting.

Don’t get me wrong. I know you are a dedicated bunch of fine helpful folks and your help and suggestions have been gladly received. My WDTV box must be one of the rare lemons. I have nothing less than admiration for your good work.

Ban me if you like. You come and explain to my partner why it takes half an hour rooting around before she can watch anything on the WDTV. What follows is my last word on what I think of the product and I won’t show my face again in this forum. It’s gone beyond getting angry, so I hope you enjoy my last instalment of the sad and sorry saga.

When is the WDTV Live use-by date? Two days after the warranty expires? It started not being able to find all the shares on the main PC on the wireless network. I fixed this for a while by getting up and switching the modem/router off, waiting 10 seconds then back on. That worked fine for about a week until that also stopped working. I then discovered by turning off the modem for 20 seconds and that also worked for about a week.

So, then I tried to copy all the media to the laptop which the WDTV saw most often. Having disabled the Homegroup on both Windows 7 machines a long time ago, things also worked well like this for a week until the WDTV worked out what I was up to and decided it didn’t like that either.

I factory reset the box and painstakingly set it all up again from scratch, making sure it had the latest firmware. It then complained that the username or password were wrong. That was interesting because none of those have been changed.

Can someone tell me where I can change the version of English that WDTV Live likes so it can understand the username and passwords we use? I have an army of monkeys on the WDTV remote controls trying all possible historical versions of the 4 letter user name and password we must have set back in the olden days of yore, about a year ago before the English language version used by WDTV must have morphed.

I ran the network troubleshooter on both the PC and Laptop to find what the problem was with our network, but it couldn’t find any problem. Microsoft software must be broken so I sent them a sternly worded bug report telling them to call the WDTV software people so they can tell Microsoft how to rewrite there entire OS to suit the WDTV’s correct way of doing things. Strangely, they haven’t replied yet. They must be busy sacking there entire network team as I see lots of ‘Network Engineer’ want ads on MySpace.

One victory I had one night was that I stood on one leg, faced north while whistling Dixie, the WDTV found my network shares without rebooting the whole network! I’m concerned though. Next time I tried that, it didn’t work. I failed to take into account that the world had since shifted in space and time. I think the WDTV’s flux capacitor knows what I am up to and won’t have a bar of it. The audacity of some users to expect a fix to work for more than a week must be dealt with severely.

I had a horse once that misbehaved just like the WDTV does. I took it out the back and shot it. Most of this can’t be taken seriously, it’s just like the WDTV in our house. A big joke.

Permission to give this to the engineering team for a laugh - Granted.

Thank you and goodbye.

I am sure this guy will not be missed by anyone here.

mike27oct wrote:

I am sure this guy will not be missed by anyone here.

Yeah, but the post was pretty amusing and worth the read for a laugh. “time shift”, “flux capacitor”, the shooting of a horse… Funny Stuff.

-P

1 Like

I hit the WDTV Live with a sledgehammer. I went to the tip with the carcass.They refused to accept it.

Somehing along the lines of ‘Attempting to illegaly dump toxic material’.

I love you all too fanboys. 

Next time send it to us since it’s working for us. Could use another one in the bedroom.

1 Like

I was reading the posts and have a question.  I received my WDTVLive today and have it set up.  I am experiencing some problems getting my computer to talk to the box.  I am sure it is something I am doing.  I ran the sofeware listed above and found my router to be the master.  Is that okay or should the master be a computer?  I guess I do not understand how to do this.  I don’t have any issues doing anything online but I have never tried to share between computers.  The box is connected to the network and I have even looked at some of the things available online.  Any help would be deeply appreciated.

gonefishing wrote:
 I don’t have any issues doing anything online but I have never tried to share between computers. 

Well, you sound like me 4 years ago.  Not rocket science, but it does require a crash course in Home Networking 101.  You create your own course by reading the materials in the complete manual for your player, reading Help in your Windows program, google like crazy, etc.  Once you have a home system fully networked you can do a lot cool things.

Yes, the best master browser is the router that is on 24/7, but not all can do this.

Tip: remove the WDTV from the network if necessary, but first get two computers in the house to share folders, etc between one another, Once this is done correctly, bring the WDTV back into the loop.  The WDTV manual explains sharing pretty well, so start there.

Oh, and next time you want to post a message why not start a new thread, because this one turned out to be mostly for comic relief by the time you posted in it!    :laughing: 

Welcome aboard, now start reading, or as some may say, RTFM.