My son was visiting today and I saw our WD Live do something I did not know was possible. We were watching a video on the WD live which was located on a shared drive on an external computer in the other room when suddenly the screen went black and we started viewing pictures located on his Android phone. It took a while to believe what I was seeing, but once I decided it was really happening we viewed all the pictures on his phone and it was great. Once we were done with that I did not know how to get control back again so power cycled the WD player and everything was normal again.
So my question is - what happened there! There was so much chaos here I never got what he pressed on the Android phone to make that happen. I just know he was viewing pictures on his phone and he was about to quit when it happened. Someone may have even hit something on the WD remote for all I know. I was just wondering if anyone could point me to how that could happen and is it an officially supported feature. I can’t find anything that describes such a feature. The Android was logged into my local WiFi network and so was the WD Live. Is there some way to view pictures on an Android by “pushing” them to the WD Live player?
I have been playing with this on my android phone recently. I found 2 apps that can do this but I’m sure there are more. They are imediashare and zappo tv. Both are able to steam music video and photos to your wd tv live. Neither are supported by wd. I found that imediashare worked better but I haven’t used it much as I only upgraded to a wd tv live on Christmas day.
So looking at that web site the key sentence is: "You can also stream it to DLNA-Certified™ and UPnP-compatible TVs, IP-connected stereos, PlayStation 3 game consoles, Windows 7 PCs thousands of other connected consumer electronics devices anywhere.
I would like to be able to do this from my laptop so I can view pictures by controlling it from my laptop. Is there a " DLNA-Certified™ and UPnP" app I can run to do this? I don’t have an Android phone. This is a very cool feature. I’m surprised they are not advertising it yet. Maybe it’s still in a development stage.
ZappoTV was recommended in the forums recently, and they have one app specific to the WD TV Live HD players, and I have been using it lately and it is kinda cool. App just updated again the other day. It works with iThings and Androids, AND WD, Check out this link:
This link is for the generic version for use with DLNA TVs, but there are others – look down the page until you find the one for WD. Yes,it costs $2.99 – big deal, it is made specifically for our WDs, and how many apps for the WD have you found? Be sure to download the HD version of the app.
The reviews are a turn-off, but I think many people just can’t figure out how to use this or other apps, their network, their WD, and even their toaster*, so they give out a negative review. It works fine for me, and updates make it better.
ZappoTV for the WD – recommended.
* Wife asked for a new Cuisinart toaster for Xmas, so I gave her one! She likes it; it even has LEDs. (on a TOASTER!)
I still can’t figure out if it is DLNA compliant – maybe with the next firmware release…
That looks pretty cool too but I don’t have an iPad either. Running an app on my laptop called UPnP Inspector I see that WDTVLive shows up on my network as a “MediaRenderer”. I think that means if a run a “Media Server” of some kind on my laptop I can send content to the “renderer”, so now I’m looking for that. Interesting stuff.
mikesmithv >> I would like to be able to do this from my laptop so I can view pictures by controlling it from my laptop.
I just saw this comment in one of your previous messages. You don’t need an app to do this. If you have a Win 7 PC, it, too, is DLNA compliant, and you can use the Windows “Play to” feature to send photos, videos and audio to your WD.
Read about “Play to” in the Windows help, and you can get it to work for you.
Thanks for the info. I’m running Windows XP but I it appears that Windows Media Player 11 supports that even under XP. I went to the “Media Sharing…” menu item under Library but I did not see the WDTVLive device (or anything else) in the list. Disabling the Windows firewall temporarily did not help. But thanks for the pointer, I’m sure I’ll figure that out eventually. I know WDTVLive is available because UPnP Inspector see’s it. I found a way to view one picture at a time from my laptop using an app called MediaTomb under Linux but that’s pretty geeky, but at least I found ONE way to do it.
Here is something you can play with. Its a program that runs on your PC and it can play media from the PC to the TV via the WD Player. Make sure that you have set up the folders to be scanned in the server setting and that the local server is turned on (green - bottom right). It can also scan your whole network and then play to your WD player or DNLA device from your PC.
You have to input some details (name and email address) and you are sent a link to the download page. (its free)
Rich, MediaPilot looks cool. Do you use it on your PC – iPad or iPhone.?
Is there an advantage of using the PC version over using Window’s Play To feature?
Is having PC and iThing versions of the same program advantageous in a unique way?
I use File Browser, ZappoTV for WD, and even Pogoplug to access and play stuff, and each has its own unique attributes. A few days ago, I even set up the feature of my ASUS router called AiCloud, which allows access to files on my network drives and play the stuff on the iThings.
Lot’s of ways to do these things, and haven’t found a “one size fits all” app just yet. Maybe there isn’t one.
I only just found it and installed in on my PC in response to this thread. I’m running XP so there is no play to, this program gets round this limitation. Its a bit flakey but it does work. I generally use ZappoTV but I notice that there are a number of push apps around recently, some better than others.
Rich, it looks like a pretty good find. We run both Win 7 and XP machines, so I’ll give it a try as well; especially for the XP. Will try the iThing apps, too.
“Flakey” as you mention, is the operative word for some of these apps. All of them I use are prone to crashing/locking up. etc. sometimes. Suppose it goes with the territory for now.
Thanks for the suggestion. I installed MediaPilot I can publish my pictures folder and view them on the “Local Player” but nothing else show up . Do you see WDTVLive in the upper left corner box? I assume that is where it should appear but I only see “Local Player”.
Rich, I installed MediaPilot and gave it a test drive. Not intuitive. Like the poster above me, I could not get it to work correctly, and when I clicked the link for the user manual – not there!
Fortunately, the uninstall progam that came with the program worked perfectly, because after some time fiddling with the program I gave up and removed it. (I did need to remove the master folder named “Access” after uninstall.) Fortunately again, I always create a restore point before installing something new, and that ran fine and got my PC back to before installation.
