Making videos available which are stored on external drive.

[GeoStroud]

I recently purchased a Sony BlueRay player, a Netgear wireless router with DLNA and USB storage support and a Western Digit 2TB Mybook drive. My intent was to store videos of TV programs on the WD drive attached to the Netgear router and access them from the Sony player using the DLNA function of the router. However, the Netgear router DLNA support does not work reliably and Netgrear Tech support was useless as is often the case when there is actually a bug in a consumer product. When I say "work reliably", I mean that I can see the Videos files and but I have never been able to view more than one complete video before getting a message reporting that the file is corrupted or unsupported. This is not the case as I can go back and restart the video and it will play through to the end.

In any case, I began storing the videos on my PC running Windows Vista Home Premium x64 where I can view them reliably using the Sony BR player. FYI, I have viewed over 100 videos stored on the PC with once getting this failure even though the video is streaming from the PC to the Sony BR player via the Netgear router.

However, this is using up a lot of valueable disk space on my hard drive. I tried attaching the WD 2TB USB drive to my PC and moving the files to the USB drive but the Sony BR play does no find them when they are stored on a externally attach drive even if I add the drive to the indexed search function.

Can anyone tell what it takes to make video files on an externally attached drive visable on the network? I am sure what function the BR player is using to locate the files but it does find the files store on the primary hard drive. I do not know if Windows presents itself as a DLNA server or some other mechanism is used.

 

[Patonb]

Have you tried mapping a network drive?
THE LIMITATIONS is in the software, so maybe having the wd mapped as a local drive may let the player find it.

 

[GeoStroud]

Thank you for your reply but perhaps I was not clear. I moved the WD USB drive from the Netgear router and directly attached it to a USB port on my PC. It was a locally attached drive with an assigned drive letter. I also added it to the Windows indexed search facility. The videos on the USB attached drive still do not appear in the list of videos when I select "all videos" on my PC through the Sony BlueRay player. Only those videos on the primary hard drive appear in the list.

I have even tried creating a short cut in the directory in the main drive directory containing files which are visible to the directory on the USB attached drive that contain the video files on that drive.

 

[Patonb]

Hmmm, Not to sure then.

I think this is more of a sony software issue... Might want to try on their forums... Sorry.