Cannot stream movies in any way

[bjornte]

Hi, we’re having real trouble streaming movies in any way from the My Passport Wireless. These are the things we cannot do or can only do with great difficulties:

• We cannot read/write anything when mounting the disk to a MacBook Pro using the USB cable. After a few seconds, the LED starts flashing a white light, and the disk never becomes visible to the Mac.
• We cannot stream video via our home network (when the My Passport Wireless shares content over the network). The video lags extremely much, way too much to bear. This is on a responsive network where we often stream HD video from other sources.
• It is also highly unreliable to stream video via the My Passport Wireless’ own wi-fi network. It never works on the Mac, sporadically through the iPad WD app, but also here the disk takes ages to be identified by the WD app, so it is too cumbersome to use.

In all, it’s always a 20 min. process to be able to watch a video, and even then it’s only 30-50% chance of success. Right now we failed using all methods. Result: We’re watching YouTube.

Is this expected behavior?

[Joerg_A]

Hi @bjornte

We cannot read/write anything when mounting the disk to a MacBook Pro using the USB cable. After a few seconds, the LED starts flashing a white light, and the disk never becomes visible to the Mac.

flashing white LED means charging. Maybe your MPW battery state is too low. Let the MPW being charged fully which may last some hours. Afterwards, it should be connected with some seconds.

We cannot stream video via our home network (when the My Passport Wireless shares content over the network). The video lags extremely much, way too much to bear. This is on a responsive network where we often stream HD video from other sources.

Lagging video may point to wifi interferences and/or a wifi throughput that is too low to handle the stream. Example: 720p video is streamable if the MPW is in the same room as the accesspoint to which it is connected to. Wifi streaming of 1080p normally is impossible even with 802.11n 300 MBit Wifi.

It is also highly unreliable to stream video via the My Passport Wireless’ own wi-fi network.

Related to my answer above, I assume a wifi issue here. Best practice in wifi is to use WPA2 with AES encryption only. As soon as you activate TKIP or TKIP+AES, then your wifi is limitied to 144 Mbit/s instead of 300 Mbit/s. Would be an option to check what Wifi security encryption is actually in use.

Is this expected behavior?

No, of course. The MPW was made for such a usage.