I’m not sure what you mean by " shares on the XP machine. Can you get to them from the wireless machines and play content? " I can print to my network printer from my wireless.
The whole idea behind a network connection for the WD box is to be able to get to network shares on another machine or to get to a USB connected drive on the WD box, from another machine on the network, or to go to outside addresses like YouTube from the WD box.
For instance, I have an XP machine that I keep online all the time. On it I have several shared folders and drives that contain movies, mp3’s, and photos. The WD box lets me place the box near a tv, having only a network connection to the XP machine, and be able to play movies, mp3’s or photos on the tv. With 2 WD boxes I can have 2 tv’s playing different movies, all thru the network connections from each WD, back to the XP machine. I only have to store the movies at one location, and be able to play them to any WD connected TV.
Conversly I could (though I don’t) connect a USB drive to the WD and play movies, etc. from the WD box to any or all pc’s on the network.
I use to have the WD media player that does not hae the networking. I used an external hard drive to watch things I have stored but was a pain disconnecting the harddrive and connecting to my computer to load and then reconnecting to play. I was hoping to beable to just copy files over to the harddrive I have connected to the WD. I don’t think I have my computers setup to share files between them? Is this what I need to add the WD to my network? I only recently added my printer to my network when a friend told me that is how his computer was set up. The instructions where very straight forward on how to do this and everything worked fine. I thought by buying the WD it would be simularly easy to set up as well. I guess I’ve moved beyond my ablities.
In my case, when I buy a DVD, the first thing I do is “Rip” it (copy it) to a USB drive. I do this on my XP machine, where I have a DVD drive to put the DVD in. That DVD is now available to any of my 6 network connected TV’s to watch. In your case you could disconnect the drive from the XP machine and reconnect it to your WDTV and then watch it whenever. Also you could watch it from any pc on your network, using the WDTV as the movie server.
A normal DVD can be as much as 8 GB and an AVI of the same DVD might be 2GB. Either way it takes quite a while to transfer that much data over a 10/100 ethernet network. You can do it though. To be able to transfer it from the XP machine to the WDTV’s USB drive, you would need to put the files in a folder that you share in XP.
The advantages of network connected devices is that they can be accessed from any other machine on the network. Instead of having a printer connected to each machine, you can have one network connected printer used by all network connected pc’s. Same for your pictures, movies, and songs … stored in one place but used by all networked pc’s and devices … stored on your WDTV.
Do I setup all this through XP or my network? Will I ever get the DSN to connect?
The shares can be on the desktop or any of your wireless pc’s. To setup sharing on your desktop, you create a folder that is going to hold the files you want to transfer to the WDTV. Then right mouse click and choose sharing. Check “share this folder on the network” and OK.
The DNS is only needed for addresses outside your home network. But those values we discussed should work, since that’s the way your desktop machine is getting out on the internet. You might triple check that you entered the DNS correctly into the WDTV. To quote the immortal Sherlock Holms “Whenever you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”
If you can’t see the share on the desktop from the WDTV then we’re not done yet.
I had the same problem with three different units . No automatic Network connection and after some time manual connection failed . I have sent several messages to WD support without result. The product is not stable and has bugs. I have returned all units back to the resseler and I have purchased an other media player.
