I have a WDTV and Mac running 10.11.5, I’ve been having problems with the two devices speaking to each other. My browsing tells me other users experience the same issue.
My aim is to wirelessly connect to the Mac to watch movies. The problem has been the point where the WD TV asks for me to enter the account name and the password. The question for me was “What Account Name?” Ditto password.
The account name is the name you’ve given the Mac when you set it up (I don’t know the jargon and someone could probably do a far better job of explaining this than me), but one way to identify it is to:
Open finder and click on Macintosh HD (this might be in the lefthand pane), look in the main Finder pane for the Users folder, under this there should little house icon. That name is the Account Name you are looking for.
Password
I’m pretty certain this is the password you use to login to the Mac from when it starts up / goes to sleep etc.
If you follow these steps you should be able to access the files you’re after. Unfortunately, and hopefully someone can assist here, it gives you access to the entire Mac file directory. For some people this won’t matter as you will know what you are after and will leave the rest alone. However, it’s obviously not ideal, for instance, children could play with the remote and cause something undesirable to happen to the Mac.
Hopefully this helps a few users, it’s something the WDTV technical support staff couldn’t help me with, which was very frustrating because once you know just what password and username it is asking for it’s not a big deal, but if you don’t know it is extremely frustrating, the ugly user interface doesn’t help either.
I was in the same boat as you. Only being able to access my whole Mac. However I did find a way to limit it to a specific folder(s).
First you go to system preferences and Users and Groups and setup a new user for Sharing Only. Give it whatever Name and Password you want (you will also need these for the media player later on).
Then back to system preferences and Sharing. Click on File Sharing so box is checked.
Under Shared Folders, add folder(s) you want the WD TV Media Player to access.
Once folders are added, click on folder, and add User you just created in step 1 above, and change to Read and Write (that’s how I have it, it may work with Read Only, I’m not sure). If you have multiple folders, you need to do this step for each folder individually.
Finally under Options check the Share Files and Folders Using AFP, and click the username you have just created so box is checked.
Then when it comes to your Media Player where it asks for your Account Name and Password, your Account Name is the name of the User you have created in Step 1 and likewise the Password is the password set for User in Step 1.
