WD My Book Live DLNA streaming issue with Samsung Smart TVs

The management of files, photos and videos, is becoming more and more important at work, in the IT, but also at home for the family entertainment. If NAS drives remain in many cases a prerogative of “professional” environments, the need to store large amounts of data is increasingly felt as well at home.

The WD My Book Live with the DLNA server is a perfect living room companion

All your content in one place, enjoyable anywhere. The WD My Book Live is a personal cloud storage, a NAS accessible from home but also from the web. Connect the My Book Live drive to your wireless router for shared storage on your home network that you can access within and outside the home. Share files with computers, stream media to your entertainment center and access files on-the-go with secure, remote access and apps for your mobile devices.

This is why WD sell the My Book Live, but there is something more and more. The drive can be a small multimedia server for your home and you can also install another server applications on it. The core system of the WD My Book Live is based on Linux, so you can do what you want with it. Built with an 800 MHz CPU for maximum performance to power all your applications from streaming to remote access. Designed around the most recent advances in Gigabit Ethernet chip technology, this product delivers best-in-class read speeds. Here the full specs.

The built-in media server streams music, photos and movies to any DLNA-certified multimedia device such as a media player, Blu-ray Disc player, Xbox, PlayStation and connected TV. The on-board Twonky media server is DLNA 1.5 & UPnP certified. And you can do also more: you can install the lighter and faster WD’s DLNA Media Server, you can install a Transmission server to download and store Torrents directly on the NAS, you can use apps to access the drive from the web and something more.

How to solve the WD My Book Live DLNA streaming issue with Samsung Smart TVs

Unfortunately, both with Twonky or DLNA media server, the WD My Book Live shows a lot of issue with Samsung Smart TVs. Recently, I catch an offer and bought an amazing Samsung 40MU6400, a perfect companion to fit an HDR gaming console and to watch 4K movies from the personal network. Anyway, Samsung Smart TVs suffers big problems with the media servers of the WD My Book Live: in practice, they do not see the contents placed on the network from the media server and when they see them, they do not allow trivial operations such as pausing, fast forwarding or fast rewind.

To solve such annoying issues, we need to tweak a bit the config file of the DLNA media server. (For the Twonky look elsewhere because it’s not opensource, so I immediately removed it).

First, just go to http://{NAS Address}.local/UI/ and enter your password.

Check and credentials for the ssh access to My Book Live Linux system

Second, to enable SSH access, just go to http://{NAS Address}.local/UI/ssh and enable SSH Access check.

Then open a terminal and connect with ssh:


cialu ~ $ ssh root@{NAS Address}

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

yes

root@{NAS Address}'s password:

welc0me

Now, you’re connected through ssh to the Linux system on the My Book Live.


{NAS Address}:/# cd .. #go to root folder

{NAS Address}:/# ls #list all folders

CacheVolume boot etc lib nfs root shares tmp DataVolume debootstrap home lost+found opt sbin srv usr bin dev led_color media proc selinux sys var

{NAS Address}:/# cd usr/local/dlna-access/xml/ #go to dlna config folder

{NAS Address}:/# cp dms_user_agent.xml dms_user_agent.xml.bak #make a backup of the config file

{NAS Address}:/# vi dms_user_agent.xml #edit the config file

Locate the Samsung TV device id:


<device id="Samsung TV">
<useragent condition="samsung">~42;DLNADOC/1.50~42;</useragent>
<customSubtitle>samsung</customSubtitle>
<xmlCustomization>samsung</xmlCustomization>
</device>

And modify it with this:


<device id="Samsung TV">
<useragent condition="samsung">UPnP/1.0 DLNADOC/1.50</useragent>
<customSubtitle>samsung</customSubtitle>
<xmlCustomization>samsung</xmlCustomization>
</device>

Save and close the file with: