Okay, so here’s my problem:
I have the WD TV Live Plus connected to the TV and that works fine. I can access shared folders on my laptop across the network. But I cannot access the external drive when it is connected to the laptop. I have verified all of the permissions and the external drive shows that it is shared but the WD TV does not recognize it.
What I would like to do is connect the external drive to the USB port on my Belkin access point and access it over the network. When I connect the external drive to the access point the WD TV sees a network share named “Belkin” but I get the message “there is no media in the current folder”.
The reason I want to do it this way is so that I can eventually add a second WD TV (if I get the first to work) so that I can access all of my media from either room. If I were to connect to the external drive locally to the WD TV would a second box be able to access the external drive over the network?
I have no problems with sharing my WD externals attached to my PC, so I’m not quite sure what’s not set properly for you.
I believe many people have tried connecting USB drives to routers, but I don’t think people end up having much luck – I don’t recall anyone getting this to work successfully.
Yes, the drive attached to one would be visible from another WDTV over the network, but I think the boxes’ network capacity might lack the power to both stream over the network to another location and playback locally at the same time. You’d be able to access one drive from the other WDTV, but I think you’d have playback problems if both WDTVs were trying to play media at the same time. I think (other than a marketing gimmick) that’s why they upgraded the network capacity of the Live Hub – so that it could do just that.
Thanks. This helps. I guess I have no problem leaving the 2TB drive connected to the WD TV as long as I can access everything from a second WD TV (not simultaneoulsy).
Will the WD TV support multiple drives connected locally, simultaneously, via the two USB ports or through a USB hub for additional capacity? I have a LOT of media and the 2TB will be full very soon.
If anyone has been able to access a USB drive connected to a router please let me know. This would be my ideal set up.
Of course the issue with leaving the drive connected to one WDTV is that that WDTV will need to be on in order to access the drive from the other WDTV.
But yes, 2 drives can be connected to the 2 USB ports.
As far as I know, if you tried using a hub, you could only have one drive plugged into it (if it worked at all). Some people report no luck at all with hubs, and I think those who have had luck with a hub, have only had one drive attached, and the other ports have been USB dongles or keyboards. It’s fairly certain you would not be able to have more than 2 drives total connected to each WDTV.
I wish I could help you with the router connection… my router doesn’t have a USB port (it’s ancient). I don’t know whether yours is strictly limited to things like network printers, or how you’d get the files/folders shared properly. As I said, I’ve seen others say “it’s not working…” but I’m not recalling anyone getting a drive attached to their router to share properly off the top of my head.
I did a quick search for attaching a USB drive directly to a router.
Most of the answers I’m getting seem to say you need to buy extra hardware, like a Linksys Network Storage Link … you plug the USB drive into the manager, and then it connects to the router.
It basically turns a generic USB drive into a NAS.
The LinkSys E3000 has built-in Samba and UPnP capabilities. I have two E3000s on my network, but I don’t use them for that function, so I can’t give you a review. I DO know that the Samba implementation doesn’t work nicely with the WDTVs, so I have them set to a Workgroup that is different than everything else…
