WDTV Live Plus - No Media Servers

Hello, my WDTV Plus is not seeing any of my set up media servers. I have searched and read multiple threads like this one but nothing I have tried has worked.

What I have:

WDTV hardwired into my router (Netgear WGR614v10)  with my other network devices.

Latest WDTV Firmware

Windows 7 with firewall disabled and service stopped.

Windows Media Player media server up and running.

Playon Media server up and running.

I am able to watch media via the network shares, usb drive and other online media (netflix) just fine. I am also able to launch media from Windows 7 via the “Play to” command on Windows Media Player. I have tried restarting all the equipment multiple times. Under “Media streaming options” on W7 the WDTV Live Plus is there and set to Allowed along with my other pc’s.

I cant really think of much else to try other then calling WD. Any help on this would be great.

Thanks.

Mine was doing that a lot lately, too.  Network Shares worked fine and PlayTo from the Win7 PC still worked, but I could no longer access Media Server from the WDTV.

I think the problem lies at Microsoft’s end, and not with the WDTV… I think WMP doesn’t respond in a timely manner to the WDTV requests, and the WDTV gives up waiting.

I spent days trying to fiddle around with settings (even though nothing had changed from when it was working with the exception of a few Windoze updates).  At that point I gave up and ignored it, since I never use the Media Server anyways.

A few days ago I tried again, just for the heck of it, and all my shared Library folders just showed up.

I know none of that is helpful to you… sorry… but trying to get WMP to play nicely seems to be an impossible dream.

Thanks for the reply. The reason I was interested in the media server in WMP was that I was having stuttering problems playing .avi xvid files through the network shares and heard that if you played them through the media server they would not stutter. Sure enough when I use the “play to” command in WMP i get 0 stuttering.

I hate to pose another question but does anyone understand why that is? Why do i get stuttering when playing a file through network shares but not WMP media server? If I could get my network shares to play properly I really wouldnt need media servers.

Basically the issue is Samba… the transfer protocol for Network Shares.

It has a top end to transfer speeds… if the bitrate of your file is below what Samba can handle, then your NetShares files will play fine.  If the bitrate exceeds the Samba throughput, then the file will “stutter” over NetShares because it can’t be sent fast enough, but the exact same file will play fine from local storage or over Media Server (neither of which use Samba/CIFS).

Incidentally, the third-party firmwares from b-rad can use NFS shares instead of CIFS shares, so that’s another possible route to avoiding Samba’s bitrate cap.  And, if I remember correctly, it’s only on the home-ish versions of Windoze where Samba presents a limit – I believe folks who have one of the Server versions of Windoze also don’t end up hitting the Samba cap.

I wish I could help you with WMP and your Media Server, however.  As I say, I haven’t found the “magic settings” yet, and the consensus I get is “it’s just like that – don’t use Media Server :wink:”.   :smileyvery-happy:

None of my files exceed what Samba can do, so Net Shares works well enough for me… I basically just keep checking the Media Server, so that when folks come in and say “this firmware broke Media Server”, I’d be able to let WD know whether it still works for me.  As I said, it had been working for me, and then just stopped… but it was between firmware releases, not after installing a new firmware – the “breaking” of it doesn’t seem to correlate to a particular firmware revision for me.

Ok so I’ll look into the B-rad firmwares and hopefully that will solve my issues. Not knowing much about his releases, are they generally safe to use? Thanks again.

Generally safe, yes.  He includes a disclaimer that there’s a possibility that your WDTV could get “bricked” but I’ve personally never heard of it happening.

For various testing purposes, I’ve probably installed his firmwares and the stock WD firmwares over 100 times back and forth.  I’ve only encountered one problem.

One of the flashings, it got stuck… it just sat there at 0%… I left it for 2 hours and it never budged.  I had to pull the power plug.  When I plugged the power back in, I got a warning screen that my firmware was corrupt and I needed to attach a USB device that had a “recovery firmware” on it.  I attached a USB drive that had a stock WD firmware on it, and everything got repaired and re-flashed just fine.  I then tried again, and that time the WDLXTV installed itself without a hitch.

Some of the added features can be a bit daunting for the first-time user, and it did seem to take longer for the box to boot up when running WDLXTV instead of stock WD firmwares, but overall I’ve been rather impressed with his efforts, and the efforts of the others who contribute to his projects.

The only other catch is that he has run out of space.  There will never be a flashable version of WDLXTV based on 1.04 or 1.05 WD firmwares, because there simply isn’t room in the NAND where the firmwares are stored.  His work-around is to provide a flashable version based on 1.03.49, and then it loads extra modules from a USB drive… my understanding is that this method will allow him to include the newer features of the 1.04 and 1.05 releases, but obviously boot times will be even longer, since the “second” operating system needs to be loaded after the device boots up.  But, in all honesty, I haven’t had time to try any of his releases since Christmas, so I’m not quite up-to-date on his latest efforts.

I have decided to just use Handbrake to convert my library to mkv and that solves my stuttering problem. I would however like to give PlayOn a go and still cannot see any media servers with my WD TV. I tried the latest b-rad firmware just to see if that would help and it did not fix the media server problem.

If anyone else could think of a resolution it would be much appriciated, thanks.

Again, not that this helps you much, but I wanted to try and confirm that it’s WMP that is broken for me, and not the WDTV Live, so I did some rollbacks…

1.05.04 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.04.31 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.04.22 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.04.17 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.04.10 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.03.49 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.03.43 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.03.42 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.02.21 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

1.01.24 – Media Server won’t connect anymore

I’m guessing the problem lies elsewhere (like with Microsoft). :wink:

It’s very hit-and-miss… sometimes I just get “cannot connect to network” and nothing will show… sometimes I get the first page and it hangs when I select “folders”… sometimes I can get the folder list but it hangs when I try to open a folder… It’s virtually impossible to get to a point where I can actually try playing a file.

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Ok I could try another OS install and see if that helps any, thanks for your help RoofingGuy.

I have the same exact problem with a media server running on a desktop on my internal network.

I have two Win 7 boxes both running WMP 12.  Box one is a desktop, box two is a laptop. I can see the media server running on the laptop but not the one running on the desktop from WDC live plus.  I’ve tried about everything to make the setup on the desktop look like the setup on the laptop but with no success.  I’ve set every advanced media streaming setting alike on both boxes.

It’s not my network because I can connect to the network shares on the desktop.

BTW, I have Uverse installed at my house and I have the same problem there.  I can see the laptop media share but not the desktop using their media share function.  And I can’t see desktop media share from the MS media player on the laptop.

Therefore I don’t think it’s not a WDC problem.  I think it’s a MS setup issue on the desktop.

Sure would like to discover what’s causing the problem with the media streaming on the desktop.

hpnutty wrote:
I think it’s a MS setup issue on the desktop.

That’s the way I’m leaning at the minute.

My Win7 box and my wife’s Vista box can access the other one’s media server, but both of them just time out when I try to use my WDTV to access.

About one time in 10 I can get the list of libraries, before it times out, but even those times, I can’t get it to actually open any of the library folders without timing out.

I even tried clearing the Win7 library so that it now only contains one file.  It still times out trying to serve the library list to the WDTV.  And I’ve reset the media sharing countless times… it is “set up” correctly.

I tried several other free servers, such as TVersity, and they all work fine with the same library of files.  And I’ve tried all the WD firmwares that used to work.  All fingers point to Windows breaking something again. It seems to clearly be an issue of WMP (both 11 and 12, since it won’t work with either Win7 or Vista) no longer serving to non-Windows DLNA devices.

The Win7 box will still “PlayTo” the WDTV, it just won’t act properly as a DLNA server anymore.

None of the tech gurus at Microsoft’s TechNet have any useful answers.

As soon as I have the time I’m going to wipe my boot drive and do a clean install of Win7… I’m then going to install each Microsoft Update one by one and test the DLNA until I find the one that breaks the server… I can’t see any other way to proceed… until we (and the WD engineers) know why WMP isn’t working as a server anymore for some folks, there’s not much they can do to band-aid the firmware to get it working again.

I reinstalled media player 12 on the desktop and now both the desktop and laptop media shares are seen by both WDTV Live Plus and Uverse, plus the network shares work.  The only thing I can’t do is “Play To” from the laptop to Live Plus or the desktop, but that’s a small issue.  I also enabled the guest account on the desktop at the same time but I’m not sure that had any to do with the solution.

I reinstalled media player using the “Turn Windows Features On or Off” function.

I read about this solution someplace else on the web and the guy that posted the solution said that it did not work after he rebooted his PC.  I did not have that problem.   It works fine after a reboot.

I’m running WDTV Live Plus firmware 1.05.04 with a Rosewill RNX-N180UBE wireless adapter and two wireless routers in the house, Dlink DIR-655 (b/g/n) and the Uverse supplied 2Wire 3800HGV-B (b/g).  I get no stuttering on 5gb+ bluray movies through either router.

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Whichever update “broke” WMP, might have been re-installed when he re-booted.

I never thought of reverting WMP back to its stock installation by turning it off and then back on.  That’s a lot easier than cloning the drive for backup, and then doing a clean install of Windows.

This should make it quicker to find out what actually “breaks” the server.

Thanks for posting.

Except it didn’t work for me.  I went to “Turn on and off” and turned WMP off and the computer re-booted.

When the computer came back up I turned WMP back on, and reset the “Stream media” settings and I’m still back to where I was before.

The first time I tried from WDTV, I thought it was working again, because I got the first folder list for the libraries… but it’s the same “network unavailable” when I clicked anything.  When I "Back"ed out to the main WDTV menu and went back into Video – Media Servers – Jim – again I’m getting the “unavailable” without even the Library lists showing.

This is becoming a real pain. :smileyvery-happy: