Accessing External HDD connected to WD TV via PC/MAC

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

I’ve googled for a while and also searched these forums but I cannot get a definitive answer.

I have the  WD TV Live Streaming Media Player, and I’m wondering if I can connect an external hard drive via USB to the player, then access it on my PC to download/load directly to the HD through the WD TV.

If so, how does one set this up?

Many thanks, I’m so glad this community exists. You guys were able to convince me to pick one up in the first place :slight_smile:

Cheers.

2

I haven’t directly downloaded to my WD TV SMP but I HAVE copied files from my desktop to a USB on the WD TV SMP.

I download to a SSD on my desktop.  That way, if I leave the desktop downloading through the night ALL my Disk Hard Drives idle shutdown and only the system SSD and the download SSD run through the night.

I “Share” my download area so access it directly from the WD TV SMP through Windows Shares.

I question why you would want the WD TV SMP, the external HDD AND your desktop(?) ALL on while downloading? :slight_smile:

It’s your system so it is entirely up to you but ???   :smiley:

3

louwin wrote:

I haven’t directly downloaded to my WD TV SMP but I HAVE copied files from my desktop to a USB on the WD TV SMP.

 

I download to a SSD on my desktop.  That way, if I leave the desktop downloading through the night ALL my Disk Hard Drives idle shutdown and only the system SSD and the download SSD run through the night.

 

I “Share” my download area so access it directly from the WD TV SMP through Windows Shares.

 

I question why you would want the WD TV SMP, the external HDD AND your desktop(?) ALL on while downloading? :slight_smile:

 

So you just plugged in the USB stick, and your desktop pc was able to see it in the network? No setup via the WD TV SMP required?

Right now I just download to a folder on my desktop which I share on the network, then the WD TV SMP streams it from my desktop. The problem is that it sometimes forgets, stutters, or just doesn’t want to play. So I figured that if I can download directly to an external HDD connected to the WD TV SMP then I can solve some of the problems.

It’s really frustrating when you’re watching something and half way through it stutters and can’t recover. It might be an issue with my network TBH, but I have an external HDD lying around so figured it might be a quick fix for now.

4

Yeah, I just plugged in a USB3.0 flash drive and looked in my network (on my Windows desktop) and there it was. It was just a quick experiment but I noticed it was exceedingly SLOW  :frowning:

I got about 3MBps transfer rate. I vaguely remember I mentioned it on a forum somewhere, either here or a TP-Link one(?) and got a response that that was all the WD TV SMP could acheive. The modem was an N600 with a few devices hanging on it.  The flash drive was capable of 80MBps “Read” and 50MBps “Write”

Just out of curiousity I JUST tried it again. This time on a 3200AC tri-band modem. I copied a 4.3Gb file to the same USB3 flash drive and got about 6MBps (peaked at 6.6MBps).  The transfer took about 13 minutes to complete. So double the speed I got on my old modem so , at least, that proves the WD TV SMP IS capable of more than 3MBps   :slight_smile:

To tell the truth I haven’t used my WD TV SMP much lately.  I tend to use the media player on the TV. It is the horrible DLNA setup but is one less device to switch on. I was impressed with the TV though 'cause, with “Sync” it allowed me to use the TV (Sony 70W850B) remote to control the WD TV  :smiley:

The path to my USB3 was/is "\Wdtvlive\disk-0".  I had to access it through - Network (WORKGROUP) - Wdtvlive (WD TV Live) - disk-0 if it is any help.

It didn’t take any setup from the SMP nor the desktop. 6MBps is too slow for my liking so I won’t use it.

Another reason I use my WD TV less is because it got too slow to play BIG 3D movies, there was buffering but I don’t know if that was the N600 modem???

I had to go back to 2.01.86 (from 2.02.32) and had to do a reset to factory and lost the “Sync” facility. Again, don’t know whose fault but I suspect the old firmware doesn’t “Sync” as well and I can’t use the TV remote any more  :frowning:

I had other problems but disconnection wasn’t one of them.  I have watched, literally, hours (8?) of movies from the WD TV without any disconnection.  In fact, I probably NEVER had a disconnection from my WD TV  :smiley:

Anyway, hope I helped you make a decision  :smiley: