That is interesting about turning off the preview mode, which should only be reading [not writing to/modifying the files or filesystem]. I would have placed my bet on the ntfs compatibility driver used by the foundation operating system WD built their media player environment on. I never had preview mode enabled and recall about 80 files affected on one drive. I had two 2TB WD elements drives connected to WDTV Live at the time and two 1TB WD elements drives connected to another.
I came across this problem two years ago and after going through the motions with forum trial and error attempts in resolving the problem opted for a workaround perhaps worth considering by others, as follows:
As I have more than one WDTV live player in my domecile, I chose to improvise with a client-server solution.
I set up an old windows xp pro netbook computer I had lying around with two methods:
- SHARED NETWORK:
I set up three shared usb drives - the netbook has a unique user account for each media player with read-only access to the shared drives. This resolves the problem as the clients do not have the permission to write/modify any files from the shared network storage resources.
Windoze allows max 5 concurrent smb client access, which is ok as we have 4 player devices (only 2 are WD).I reserve the 5th smb client access for uploading new material from two PCs of which the laptop recognizes two user accounts with full write access.
- MEDIA SERVER
I also installed/configured a freely available DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server called “Universal Media Server” from sourceforge that works well although the netbook is old and thus not the fastest processing power.
- POWER
The server is set so that it powers down the drives after 30 minutes of inactivity.
- REMOTE ADMIN
To manage the netbook remotely I use RealVNC from my computer which is very rarely as most of the work is transferring files across, deleting and moving files around.
- ROUTER
The router’s DHCP service is set to assign specific IP addresses to each device as well as the laptop, so the windows name resolution does not point to an old IP address no longer assigned to the device after it has rebooted - a common error that indicates this with XP is “user authentication failure” such as “incorrect user login or password” or “no media files present” [misleading errors].
ALTERNATIVES I have not yet tried is sharing drives out on a router’s usb port or network address storage devices.
What does turn me off these are:
a) spaning filesystems across multiple drives on NAS and using non-windows/mac filesystems [operating systems are linux distributions] making it difficult to recover files by novice users under circumstances similar to this one;
b) one whould have to distinguish if different user accounts can be set up with read only access while an admin account has full read/write/modify access via network shares.
c) routers usually only have one usb port for one drive/printrer and the processing power would need to be tested with regards to stability and capacity (concurrent players).
