I’ve had an older WD TV Live Plus for a while now and liked it. But I thought I’d upgrad to the new WD TV Live for the WiFi feature.
I know I’m hooked up to my network and the internet because this thing downloaded a firmware upgrade (1.12.14). I can play Youtube videos. Everything looks OK in the network settings.
But something’s wrong. I can’t see network shares from the WD and the network can’t see the WD (other than it’s IP address showing up in the router wireless table).
I tried to ping the WD but no luck. The direct slash slash wdlivetv doesn’t work When the WD tries to access the network it can’t find any Windows shares. It just spins and spins and then the unit crashes.
I even downgraded the firmware - no luck.
Any suggestions?
Is the new LIVE in the same workgroup?
You need to make sure that your old Plus and the SMP don’t have the same device name.
If they do, then that’s your problem, each device has to have a unique name.
Thanks. Good suggestion. But the old device is sitting in the closet so I don’t think it’s causing any trouble. I’ll change the name just to be sure.
Yep. Same workgroup. I only have one and it’s named “WORKGROUP”. But good thought.
Well slap my head and call me goofy. It freekin worked. I changed the name of my unit to WDLive2 and presto everything works like a charm. You are a GENIUS!!!
And let this be a lesson to me… when everything’s working STOP fooing around with it! I did the firmware update to the latest and it’s back the way it was. Nothing showing up. Circles forever. Hangs and crashes after several min. Downgraded and still no dice. Arrrgggghhhhhh!!!
Either I’ve got a bad unit or my network’s gone bad somehow. But I can access the network from my other computers… sooo… time to head back to Best Buy and return this stinker.
Before you go returning it, did you try doing a factory rest?
By the way, when you mark the post solved, you should mark the post that solved your problem, not your own post.
When I first got a WD TV Live (about 2 FW revisions ago) I had problems like the OP when using WIndows (SMB) shares from my LG NAS. I found that setting up an NFS mount (WD calls it a Linux share) to the exact same folder cured this problem and allowed all the media files to play with no lockups, reboots etc. still using a wireless connection. This tells me the problem was something to do with SMB on the WD TV Live, though perhaps the combination of SMB + wifi + media file types caused the problem to surface. I reported the problem to WD support and received a response but I never pursued it because the NFS share did what I needed. I have been running that way ever since.
Since then, FW 12.14.1 came out and I installed it. When I read this thread I set up a share on my Windows 7 PC and played with it a little. I had no problems, but I only watched a few short videos for maybe a half hour - nothing like really watching movies on it.
It doesn’t sound to me like the OP’s WD hardware is bad because he was working good on the older firmware. What I suspect is Windows networking. I’ve always felt that their automation had the potential to mess things up by trying to make it so “easy” to configure the networking. For example, if you have several PCs on your home network it can take some time for them to all show up in Network Neighborhood (or whatever it is called now). There are concerns with the “Master Browser” as well as authentication/credentials. Sometimes things that I set up would not work and after they sat a while they would start working fine.
If I was the OP, I would load the latest FW, then rename the WD TV box and maybe even set a new/different hard coded IP address, then do a restart on the WD box (my intent is to make Windows see the WD TV box as a completely new client that it has never seen before). Then I would be a little patient and see what happens, giving it like 15 - 30 minutes. Also, on my Windows box, I set up a special user profile and password (regular, not Admin) just for the WD boxes to use, and I give it (only) Read access to the shared folder containing my media files. Of course this only becomes relevant if your WD TV Live actually sees your Windows machine.
Anyway that’s what I would try. I’ll set my WD TV boxes to use Windows shares and see if I still have problems over the next couple days like I did at first.
