I’ve had a WD Media Player Live Plus since they first came out.
I was using a 2TB WD My Passport external HD which worked great.
The other day I picked up a 4TB WD My Passport HD, but the drive is not seen by the Media Player.
Is there a firmware update available that would make this work? Or any other work-around?
Would partitioning the drive work?
I’ve never had much luck reading files off of my computer, even though they are networked through my router. I’m able to see some video files, but not all of them.
Your WDTV can only accept drives of 2TB or less. To use this drive for the WDTV you likely have to attach drive to PC and use it that way through network. My same WDTV player can see a 3TB drive on a Win 10 PC, and of course, see 4TB drives on my WD My Cloud server.
Solution 2: Get a WD My Cloud NAS to put on your network.
I figured that there was a limit to the size of the HD the WDTV Media Player could see… I was just hoping that maybe there was a work-around. Either a firmware update for the player, partitioning the drive, or viewing it as it is hooked up to my computer.
I have the 4TB My Passport HD plugged into a 3.0 USB port on my computer, but I’m unable to see it with the WDTV player. As I mentioned, I can see video files that I shot with my own camera that are stored on a 1TB internal WD HD.
I have an older 500 GB Elements HD as well as a 250 GB HD in an external case attached to the WDTV player. Both those work fine except for the limited capacity. I am able to copy files directly from the computer HD to the WDTV player HD’s via the network cable through the router. But it is a slow process as they only transfer at about 8 - 10 MB/second - painful with 7 - 12 GB movie files!
My WDTV sees 2TB drives directly connected to the media player. My Win 7 can see these drives, because i originally used the WD Discovery program to make them visible, )Win 10 sees the 2TB drive on the network) and the 3TB drive on the Win 10 is also visible from Win 7 and WDTV, One needs a Windows shared network for this to all work.
Sadly, WD never considered the possibility of HD’s larger than 2TB’s.
Right now, I have a 2TB WD MyPassport drive hooked to my WDTV Media Player, along with a 1TB Seagate Pipeline drive in an external case. I’m hoping to pick up another 2TB WD MyPassport drive soon.
That will give me one for Movies, and one for TV shows.
For whatever reason, (my poor networking skills?) I’m unable to set it up so that I can pull video from the 4TB HD connected to my computer or any of the internal HD’s inside the computer box.
I’m probably going to be looking at moving to an Android TV Box in the near future - any suggestions as to which brand/model I should be looking at?
I’d like to run more than two USB Hard Drives off of it, with hopefully more than 2TB’s capacity.
WD Live TV 4TB Passport FIX if you want to call it that. The WD Live is NOT limited to 2TB drives.
I have 2 WD Live. I have had them since new…that’s many years. I recently bought 2 -4TB Passports to replace the 2-2TB Passports. I have quite a video collection and wanted on one drive.
One WD Live READS & PLAYS the 4TB drive, the other does not.
Both of my WD Live’s have the same firmware and are the exact same model WDBAAN0000NBK-00 and made in China. Now why would one work with the 4TB hd (I tried 3 different 4TB drives, same result) and the other not? It made no sense. I found a difference.
On the WD Live that READS & PLAYS the 4TB hds it has this on the label: WDBAAN0000NBK-00 DCM:NDBCAA
On the WD Live that cannot read the 4TB hds it has this on the label: WDBAAN0000NBK-00 DCM: NAAAAA
I do not know what the DCM means in terms of functionality or difference between exact model numbers. However, if you find a used model with DCM:NDBCAA I can almost guarantee it will read the 4TB hds.
I recently encountered the same problem with a purportedly new/slightly used media player I got from eBay. (FYI: The issue isn’t the size of the external storage - I’ve been using a 6TB MyBook for almost two years no problem still playing my movies just fine) After much research it appears to be a Windows compatibility issue. WD support claims that WD Media Players - all types- have been made compatible up to Windows 7. They just don’t say which version of Win7. Since they no longer make media players, I can only assume that they’ve stopped supporting compatibility upgrades. I made sure when I purchased my new laptop 2 years ago that I got Windows 7 and not the Windows 10 version. Secondly, Windows makes patches constantly which do affect the compatibility process. This rig (new WD media player and 3 TB MyBook) was for my son and as a back up at a different location.) I used my laptop to copy from one external drive to the other via my current media player on my network. After over 100 hours of copying I attached the external drive and nothing. I now have 3 media players and none recognizes the new 3TB drive. I haven’t found a solution as yet. The only thing left to try is to format the new drive and try copying via my old media player. I have no idea if this will even work. I just wanted to post so you knew it’s not a size issue and hopefully add to your info/issues with this now not supported player.
Hi all, I just wanted to share concretely the solution to this issue. After trying multiple WD TVs with a 4tb passport, I succeeded in having the drive detected on a machine with firmware 1.04.17. The most recent firmware 1.06.43 (the final that WD released), has disabled support for drives larger than 2tb. This was first mentioned in the release notes for the firmware update, but it seems they forgot to reinstate it. Very frustrating. So you can rollback to an old version of the firmware (e.g. 1.03.49) and it will work, but you may experience other issues that WD since solved I’m subsequent firmware releases.
Hi I use a 4 TB seagate backup plus drive with it and it works fine . My sister uses a 5TB seagate drive and both have been working for the last 3 years
Hi can anyone help?
I’m looking to get hold of the firmware version 1.04.17 as mentioned by @Yojoe007 (Jan 19).
I’m hoping this will allow me to go from a 3TB WD HDD (which works fine) to a 4TB WD HDD (which currently is not seen by my WDTV Live). I can’t find this version anywhere on the WD website.
Can anyone provide me with a copy of the above firmware?
Hi @Andrew_Taylor - I’ve just had a look through the firmwares I have for this still on my computer, and I don’t see the 1.04.17 at all. I do however see 1.04.22, which is actually the firmware you get here: WD TV Live HD Media Player Firmware Update 1.04.17_V Download - even though it’s listed as 1.04.17.
Do you want to give that a try? If it doesn’t work, I have earlier firmwares I can upload somewhere. I don’t recall which version I finally ran with & can’t check as I’ve replaced the WD with an Nvidia Shield TV
