I believe some aspects of what I am encountering have been reported by others, but wanted to describe my experience in full in the hope someone will know an answer.
I own a Live Streaming and a Live Hub, both on a wired network. Until very recently, they have both been served movie files using a Linux share from a QNAP NAS. I have built a new Windows 8 Pro box which I have copied my movie collection to, and would like to use instead of the QNAP NAS.
Both the WDTV devices can be set up to add the shared drive on the windows 8 box to the media library as a windows share. They scan to build the media library, media can be played, and all seems well. But both devices will intermittently lose contact with the Windows 8 box: they will either report that “the last content source has been removed” or “there is no media in the current folder”. This can occur (a) upon starting either device, or (b) after media playback has been stopped.
Perversely, when this error occurs, you can navigate via system-media library-network share manager and press enter on the network share to view the info on the added folder, and it reports the network share as “ready”.
The error can be got circumvented once it occurs by restarting the WDTV device, or by re-entering the name of the workgroup (WORKGROUP) which restarts the network, or by telling the device to clear and rescan the library. Any one of these methods does not always work, and it sometimes takes some trial and error before the connection to windows 8 box and the media library comes back.
Note that the sharing of these files from the Windows 8 box is working perfectly with all other devices on my network (including a non WD media streamer, several PCs, IPads, etc).
I have tried lots of steps to try and stop this error occuring: stopped the Windows 8 box from sleeping or the drives from powering down, tried various configurations of user accounts and username/password on both the windows 8 box and on the WDTV devices, setting static IP addresses for the WDTV devices. None have worked to date.
For now I have moved back to streaming from the QNAP NAS via Linux. But I genuinely believe the latest version of the firmware has a serious bug in the windows networking implementation.
Any assistance with this much appreciated.