Airport Extreme and WD TV Live

[Glowaki]

I have an Airport Extreme and have a 1TB WD Hard drive attached to it via the usb. I have a number of videos on the hard drive. What I want to do is view the videos on my WD TV Live. The WD TV Live can see the Airport Extreme but indicates there are no files.
I have contacted the WD people and they advise I must enable SMB. If that option is not available they advise to confirm the router has a media server and to enable it.
I have been unable to do either.
Is anyone aware of whether it is possible to achieve what I am trying to do?

 

[phrehdd]

I don't have a definitive answer for you but here are some things to consider/try -

Hook up your usb drive directly to the WD media player. If it has settings, set it to share.

On the Mac side - see if you can set up network to do SMB. See if the WD media unit shows up on your MAC and if so, the USB drive should be available from your Western Digital media unit.

I think the problem with hooking up the drive to the Airport Express is that it is meant to talk to Apple devices. There also may be a way to set your AE, WD and Mac to all share files and sadly, this route leads to having to have your Mac on while you want to use your WD. What is happening is that WD is really talking to your MAC which has access to the USB drive on your AE.

In your shoes, I would consider attaching the drive to your WD media player and see if you can get some resolve that way. If yes, then see if you can copy files over to the USB drive from your Mac. If it is slow (which my guess it will be), try the following - FTP such as Filezilla and then experiment with removing the drive from the WD media player and connecting it directly to your MAC for copying large media files and return it to the WD media player.

Again, no definitive answer for you but just some things to consider and try.

 

[Glowaki]

Thank you. I have a WD Passport 1TB drive attached to the AE and that works. I will have a try at what you have suggested.
I only got the WD because my ATV 3 can't be jail broken. Probably should have researched more carefully before getting the WD TV.

 

[bearcatrp]

Try changing one of the movies to mp4 from m4v to see if that works. Am interested if it works as I am looking at this too to start moving away from apple ecosystem. Have 2 ATV's now. Work great. Looking at OUYA also. Would rather pull the movies to watch that run itunes to push it.

 

[aarond12]

The AEBS does support Samba. I have the same setup at my house.

However, as my two WDTVs can attest to, their firmware is buggy as hell and cause all kinds of problems. Your best bet is to attach your 1TB hard drive directly to the WDTV box. You lose sharing capabilities (unless you decide to put the REALLY buggy WDXLTV software on them) but you will be able to view your videos correctly...

...that is, if your drive is formatted in NTFS or FAT. If not, your WDTV box might not read it. (I think. I either had the drive formatted as HFS+ or XFS and it wouldn't read it. Can't remember.)

 

[Glowaki]

Thanks for the replies and interest. My files on the hard disk attached to the AE are in mv4.
I now have the 1 TB WD Passport attached directly to the WD TV Live. It took ages to load all the videos (hours) but now it is working well. I can see the WD TV on my MacBook and can make adjustments. For example after viewing a video that is part of a series I can create a viewed folder and keep viewed videos in that.
With my ATV 3 I can view videos using screen mirroring on my iPad. On the iPad itself I use File Browser to use content that is on the hard drive attached to the AE. Can't wait for the breakthrough on the jailbreak.
But now all is going well.