Disappointed with Network Issues

Before purchasing the HD Live I was using a Linksys DMA extender with Windows 7 Media Center and it worked great unless I wanted to watch something in 1080P, which is why I picked up the HD Live. The Youtube feature is nice (despite the facts that I can’t login like everyone else) but the big purchase factor for me was the network support. Unfortunately, I am having no luck getting it to work well and at this point I’m convinced its the HD Live unit that is the problem. I just thought someone may have some advice before I unplug it and throw it at the wall…

I’m running Windows 7 and after changing every possible setting I thought that some program may be the root of the issue. So now I am working with a fresh Windows 7 install with no extra software. I also have two WD 500GB external usb drives attached with all of my media. In regards to settings currently I have:

  • ‘Stream my pictures, music, videos to all devices on my network’ is checked

  • Under media streaming options I see WDTV Live and it is set to ‘Allowed’

  • Under advanced sharing the following options are selected:

      - Turn on network discovery

      - Turn on file and printer sharing

      - Turn on sharing so anyone with network access can read and write files in the Public folders

      - Media streaming is on

      - Turn off password protected sharing (i.e. password protected sharing is OFF)

      - Allow Windows to manage homegroup connections (I’ve tried this the other way which didn’t help)

My original move was to simply share each of the folders on the external drives which allowed me to access them on the WD Live under the Network Shares section. Everything was nice and organized and I was happy. Then I made the mistake of navigating through other sections and when I went back to Network Shares it asked me for a user/pass. I tried leaving them blank which didn’t work. I even set up another user on my desktop and tried to use that login which didn’t work.

After not being able to bypass the login screen (despite the fact that password protected sharing is OFF) I decided to try the Media Server section. It didn’t ask for a login so I thought I was good to go. Unfortunately after selecting ‘Folders’ in the menu I didn’t see any of the folders I had shared and was seeing in ‘Network Shares’ before it decided to bar my access.

After turning it on and off a billion times and restarting my computer numerous times I decided to unshare all of the individual folders on both external drives. Then for every folder I selected the option ‘include in library —> videos’. After they were all nice and neatly listed under the ‘videos’ section in ‘libraries’ I set videos to share to ‘everyone’.

This seemed to do the trick. After restarting the device a few times I was able to see the all of the folders from the external drives I had included in the ‘videos’ library in Windows. While the media server section on the HD Live seemed to be working Network Shares was still asking for a login. I figured I’d just live with it and use the media server section and ignore network shares.

My issue now involves not being able to add folders under media server. I have a number of very large files that I can not move to the external drives because of the file size limitation. I figured I could just create a new folder on my desktop’s hard drive and then set it to ‘include in library ----> videos’. While the folder is now available under ‘videos’ in the library with all the folders from my external drives it is not visible under the media server section on the HD Live.

So my two issues are not being able to login to the network shares section and not being able to get the media server section to see any additional folders.

Any ideas?

  • Thanks!