As far as I know, the WD TV speaks HFS+ as well as AFP (Apple file protocol)
In my network, there are no Samba shares or NTFS-Drives at all. And from the first setup of my WD TV Live 'till now, its streaming well from my shares on the MacBook, e.g. iTunes Library or “Movies” Folder, to the WD TV
Cheers - Lupunus
Edit:
The WD TV Live can stream media from shared folders on a network (SMB, AFP and Bonjour are supported) and DLNA-compliant devices thanks to its Ethernet port.
Hm, using AFP is an interesting idea. However, it doesn’t work with my Lion installation (share cannot be accessed). Does AFP work for anyone with Lion?
I tried using AFP yesterday, and I couldn’t get it to work. I ended up installing Samba3 from macports and disabling Apple’s SMB.
Note - if you use Samba3 from macports, your user cannot be a member of more than 16 groups. My normal user had 17 groups and couldn’t login from the WDTV. I created a new account (defaulted to 6 groups), and it works fine now.
So at least I can now run Lion and stream movies. So far, it has worked fine. Hopefully WD will be able to release an update soon (since Samba has been updated) to work with the native Apple SMB implementation. Many other vendors have released updates (Drobo, Qnap, EMC, etc), so I’m hoping that we’ll get one too.
And I agree with some previous posters who said that WD doesn’t have to fix it, and that’s true. Apple did break it. However, I can tell you this. If they don’t fix it, I certainly won’t be buying another WD product, because I can’t expect updates. The other vendors who have fixed theirs, would get my business. That’s the way it goes.
Otherwise, for the price, it has been a decent box, and certainly worth what I spent on it. The interface could use some upgrading, as it’s not nearly as nice as several of the other boxes (fan art, covers, etc). I know there are other firmwares available that provide some of this functionality, but it’s certainly not out of the box.
im doing some investigation about AFP access today and maybe tomorrow. There must be a reason that AFP is possible for me but not for others, as the wrote here.
I have installed MediaLink from AppStore. It work even better and stable, than Samba before. Besides it allows using your iTunes movie library. It really worth the money paid.
The point is not me to tweak things for which I have properly paid for.
You got ripped off. You paid to have a feature taken away essentially. Please direct your hate to Apple. If enough people complain they will have no choice but to restore functionality.
But as mentioned before, there’s an update of Samba which works with Lion OS. Now, it’s up to WD to support this feature in a new firmware. If everything goes as planned, then don’t expect WD to do so, lol.
So, WD is supposed to drop their use of Samba, which is industry standard, and write a whole new transfer protocol, that works with both Windows CIFS and Apple’s botched protocol?
SAMBA is not (and was never) a “industry standard” because SAMBA is nothing more than a reengineering of the proprietary Microsoft SMB protocol to have a work around for accessing Windows Shares.
Since Lion (OS X 10.7.) Apple wants not longer to license SAMBA as a workaround for a proprietary Microsoft Protocol, because every time MS make a slight change in the SMB-Protocol or authentication mechanism, all sharing stop to work and you have to wait for a new SAMBA version.
The stop of “DHCAST128” support and with that the changes in Netatalk (AFP) where communicated early enough to fix the WD Firmware.
Up to now only some Linux implementations refused to implement the actual authentication mechanism or to license the actual Netatalk for AFP support.
Nevertheless Apple’s now own implementation of the SMB works well with Windows Shares on WinXP-SP3, Win7 or 2003/2008 Server and also with SAMBA 3.x shares.
The point is, that since SAMBA want to see a license fee for industry using of the new SAMBA release, WD refuse to license the actual SAMBA version.
So why should Apple be responsible for that? It’s clearly on WD to renew the Firmware.
By the way, WD was able to roll out a new firmware for the My-Book hard disk series to support the new AFP/SMB version, so why not for the WD TV too?
Lupunus’s description is “mostly” correct, but off target in a few places.
For one thing, SMB is not a proprietary protocol, nor is it MICROSOFT’s. SMB was created by IBM and a consortium of other corporations.
CIFS is MICROSOFTS implementation of the SMB protocol.
SAMBA is the GPL Open-Source implementation of the SMB protocol.
SAMBA is *absolutely" a defacto industry standard.
Microsoft hasn’t made a change to the CIFS specification in quite a long time… It’s just that the Samba developers don’t have a FULL implementation of the SMB / CIFS specification.
Samba Team moved SAMBA to the GPLV3 license in 2007. This is *NOT* a recent change.
Has anyone from WD acknowledged that the current version of their firmware is broken with OS X 10.7 Lion, and have they mentioned when they plan on fixing this issue yet?
you can blame whoever you want. the fact of the matter is that if WD doesn’t update thier stuff to support Lion, they will loose customers. I just bought four WD TV Live’s (one for each TV) and was excited to use them until I got home found that it didn’t work with Lion w/o loading the macports stuff. So now I’m taking them back. I wonder how many others will end up doing the same thing.
Hi brettg - thanks for finding that fix. Thing is, it didn’t work for me when I tried to share my itunes music folder.
When I got to the Terminal stage, I got ‘Cannot retrieve onfo from host.: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Remote system error’ and a couple of 'Bad file descriptor’s thrown in for good measure.
I have now switched to a Boxes Box, where it works fine with Lion (and is basically a better box in every single way). WD has lost a customer due to their complete lack of support and fixes for the product.
Perhaps the newer products are better (I know the interface has improved), but it seems that WD would rather just release new hardware instead of helping their existing customers have a better experience.
I think WD is alright for drives, since they can manufacture them and then basically forget about the customer (besides defect, etc). I will still buy their drives. However, software doesn’t seem to be their strong suit.
