Modding the WDTV V1

I bought one of these devices a long time back and what it does out of the box is basically play just about anything your chuck at it and play it at full HD (1080p). It works by means of plugging in your external HD with movies, music and photographs and you plug it into your TV via HDMI. This works well enough but it means your limited to the of the hard drive you plug in. They did bring out a new model called the WDTV Live which has wired / wireless (by means of a adaptor I guess) but I did not fancy buying yet another device – so what about modding this and making it wireless and accessing my NAS box?

Flashing the firmware

I headed over to B-RAD and got myself a ** WDLXTV-0.5.8.1 ** - this is based off the WDTV firmware and I proceeded to follow the instructions. You out the file on the memory stick (I used a 1GIG slim version) and the WDTV told me a new firmware was found – I flashed and waited. At this point I had no networking as such and I had a few USB Wireless sticks to choose from but the one Virgin Media gave me when I upgraded to 50mbit was the D-Link DWA-140 – this been listed as compatible.

Hours of Messing

I followed guide after guide after guide and still no wireless working, still no shares showing up with all my movies. I then stumbled upon this post HERE, followed it to the letter and although the WDTV box told me NO-IP at the boot screen, I checked my router and indeed it had assigned 192.168.0.107. I could ping this IP but no shares, no movies – head scratching time !!

More reading

I worked out I needed the Samba pack (on the b-rad site above) and I had to read the Telnet guide also. One I had the right parts – I booted the WDTV, still read NO-IP but now it had a new share I had created called MOVIES and I could see both the network and the NAS Flashing away.

How fast though?

I tested some movies and normal divx type stuff played fine but HD stuttered. You have to remember that it was scanning the network so probably not only using bandwidth on the wireless but also the NAS was using the drives. I shall leave it indexing the NAS (might take it some time) and tomorrow I can place it back under the TV and now have complete access to all my movies, photos and Music collection - definitely worth the hassle and of course the money saved in not buying a new one.

Update: You can find some more addon’s HERE such as the Elmar Weber’s Apple Trailers Plugin & WDLXTV App pack UPnP-djmount.app.bin-0.1 which adds more functions to the little WDTV.