Streaming from Windows 7

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Hi,

I’m having trouble streaming from my Windows 7 machine.  My WD TV Live Gen 3 can see the network share just fine but when I play a 1080p video it bogs down after less than a second.  If I stream the same file from my Qnap NAS via Twonky it plays nicely on my WDTV.  The NAS and the computer are connected to the same gigabit switch.

Any idea about how I can improve the streaming performance from my Windows 7 machine?

2

I have been having similar issues, but have not found an answer. I am somewhat leaning towards the issue being the CIFS client in the WD TV Live SMP being very poor but not sure how to verify this without another media player of some kind. I have tried to play high bit rate content via my NAS and from my WIn 7 PC and both present major stuttering and don’t work after about 15-30sec of play. I did find that I could switch protocols to NFS and that seemed to greatly increase the performance and I did not have an issue playing the same files on the same NAS. I will be following this thread to see if anyone else has it working like it should.

3

One other thing that might be the issue is that playing VIDEO_TS folders is causing problems, but it seems to work fine if I simply package them into an mkv file. I am going to continue exploring and will post if I find anything that is concrete.

4

bbenz is correct. when sharing media to the SMP, SMB/CIFS is a bad choice as it has limitations.
I only use NFS if I decide to watch something through my network and 1080p works too (atleast for me).

5

I have had much better results when using NFS, but for whatever reason that I have yet to figure out the folder art (thumbnails) do not show when using NFS. Other than changing the network protocol from CIFS to NFS nothing else is changing so I am not sure why it behaves like that. If I figure out the issue then I will migrate to NFS permanantly.

6

I too had many problems in streaming from my Win 7 machine (Notebook PC) to my WDTV Live Streaming device.  I followed all the various suggestions here and other sites, but to no avail.  Everything appeared to be setup correctly, and the Win7 “Play To” applet would appear to work, but the WDTV Live would never switch to what I was attempting to stream.

Strangely my son’s Win7 machine had no such probs… The only difference between the two machines was that mine had the VMWare Player installed.  I found that when this software was uninstalled, that I too COULD stream to the WDTV Live…  But why ???

After much investigation I discovered the following.

The VMWare Player installs some virtual Network Connections, which appear in the Win7 control panel (Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections).  Disabling the connections (two on my PC) that contain ‘VMWare’ in their Device Name enabled me to stream to the WDTV Live.  Strangely I am still able to access the Internet etc from within my VMWare ‘machines’, which seems to indicate to me that those Connections could be redundant.

If there are others out there having similar problems when streaming from Win7 to the WDTV Live, and you too have VMWare Player installed, I hope this helps.