Hello there!
Let’s see if somebody can help me.
Yesterday I bought a WD TV Live and I am amazed so far. It perfectly plays my USB connected hard drives content smoothly. The thing is that I am having problems using the sharing capabilities of the device.
I am a Mac OS X user and I have an AirPort Express Base Station. The thing is that, since I am moving, I don’t have internet yet. So what I would like to do is stream content from my laptop through the WD TV Live. But since there is no internet at home, I would like to do it via a home LAN.
When configuring the internet settings of the WD, I can join the network created by the AirPort Express (though, obviously, it has to be done manually and with no DNS, since there is no door to the internet) but the shared contents on my mac can’t be reached by the WD (going to Network Sharing just doesn’t respond -it doesn’t load the devices with shared contents and it doesn’t reply with a “no shared devices” message).
FYI, the WD is connected via an Ethernet cable to the AirPort Express and the AirPort Express is just plugged. I don’t know if the WD requires an exit to the internet as a must, but it shouldn’t be the case (it should give the option of just home sharing contents with no need of internet for youtube and flickr access).
So I am wondering what I am doing wrong here. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
More information:
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The macs at home have the SMB sharing option enabled.
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There is no visibility of the WD TV Live from the mac side either.
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Both are connected to the same LAN (10.0.1.X).
It’s just as if they were on different networks or they weren’t able to communicate.
Welcome to the forums.
It’s an interesting problem. I don’t know if we’ve even seen any Mac users on this board yet. And, yet, since the Macs are Linux based (like my NAS, for example) you’d think connecting wouldn’t be that big a deal.
I have Airport express(s) all over the house (hooked up to my audio receivers to play iTunes) so I guess I could at least try hooking one of my Live units up to one and seeing what happens. I can’t do that right now, but perhaps tomorrow afternoon if you aren’t any closer to solving your issue.
Why does the Live need to connect manually to your Airport? Doesn’t the Airport support supplied addressing? When you do a auto connection search what exactly happens on the Live?
Another thing you might do is go to the Apple forums and ask for help under the Airport sub-forum. There are very knowledgable folks there who, if not have connected a Live unit, will at least have connected non-Mac devices in this manner and could give you some heads up.
Thanks for the fast reply. And thanks for the welcome message 
If you could check the issue for me with one of your devices, it would be AWESOME. I don’t need the problem fixed for today (I can use external drives), so no need to hurry. But I would like to understand what is going wrong (for future possible scenarios and set ups).
And answering your questions:
Why does the Live need to connect manually to your Airport? Doesn’t the Airport support supplied addressing? When you do a auto connection search what exactly happens on the Live?
Basically I need to connect it manually because if I use the auto search it doesn’t find a gate to the internet and the test fails (my guesses about all this is that the WD is not able to share contents in a LAN unless you have real internet access… which would be really poor). Also, when I set up the network manually, the device tells me “setup completed” (with the fancy green check on screen) but after that, if I try to test the connection, it fails because of the DNS test.
Besides, as you recommend me, I am also going to ask at the apple forums to see if I can manage something out from there.
Thanks! I can’t keep waiting for your home test results 
