I have my wonderful WD Live Plus which I love. Just recently I got a new dvd player … a blue ray player. The one I got has a media player built in and it also accesses the internet with extra media apps than the WD, The DVD doesn’t recognize my computers like the WD does, but that isn’t a problem as my plan was to use both. I wanted to use just one ethernet cable so I bought an adapter so I could have one ethernet cable going into the WD and the dvd player. Trouble is that I seem to be only able to access one media player. While one is connected the other one isn’t recognized. Is there something I can do about that? I don’t want to have to get up and unplug the ethernet every time.
Use hub or switch ethernet… 4 8 16 plugs choice is yours
Ok that seems like a way to go. I’ll look into that. I’ll keep the post updated on progress just in case there are other newbie techies who have a similar query.
Well I looked around here at home and found a trendnet router and wondered if that would work. Yes it does. It isn’t a wireless router so I thought it might. I put that inbetween the main ethernet cable and the 2 devices. One thing I don’t seem to be able to do though is to get the WDTV to recognize my laptops and ipod under Network Shares. I got that before I bought and set up the blue ray player. I want to keep them both as they are both good at certain things. Any ideas anyone?
Just checked once again … I put the ethernet cable only into the WDTVLive and it recognized my laptops, so it’s to do with the router switch … or anything else I put inbetween that is stopping it. My next test is to do the thing I wanted to avoid in the first place, i.e. run another separate ethernet cable to the Blue ray dvd. I’ll let you know what happens.
Connected a separate ethernet cable and it works, so I now have 2 cables festooned across my living room. Now my internet service keeps going off and on again… oh well at least it works. I’m now off to radioshack to take back the splitter which didn’t work for me. If anyone can think of a solution then feel free to get back to me. Thanks all.
I have renewed my hunt for a solution. It was suggested that I use a switch instead of a router or a splitter as it treats the lines as 2 separate lines. Now that makes sense. So I’m going shopping for a switch … or find the one I’m sure I had somewhere in the house. I’ll get back with an update if anyone is interested.
An update … though not solved.
Apparently, I found out (but if I’m wrong please tell me), that the switches are not for splitting a signal to 2 devices. Switches are for adding new peripherals to an existing network. Those little 3-port plastic splitters (like the phone jack ones, but for internet) are not for splitting an internet signal.
What I did find out from a youtube video actually, that there is a splitter, like the one I took back to Radioshack that can be used. However, you need two of them on the network. You need one at the modem end (2 cables in the router ports, and one going to a single cable. At the other end another splitter is added onto the single cable with 2 smaller cables each going to a machine. Trouble is it’s a bit expensive. From radioshack the splitter are $12.00 + tax each. Then you will need 2 inline couplers to joing onto the single cables. So I’ll have to save up my pocket money until Christmas for that solution.
Well I’m just passing on what I learned. Good luck if you’re trying to figure it out a different way.
