I've been battling this issue for a few weeks and I have found a solid workaround. Here is a description of the problem and my experiences with troubleshooting and resolving:
The Problem:
When a Seagate BlackArmor NAS is present on your network, the WD TV Live SMP and WD TV Live Hub will not play video files reliably.
Detailed Symptoms:
When you attempt to play an .MKV, .MP4, .AVI, .MPG or .FLV file, you will see the spinning orange arrow/circle but the video will never start. Sometimes you can get the device to play a video file once after a reboot but it will refuse to play any additional video files after that.
Important Notes:
- This issue does NOT seem to affect playback of .ISO files. Even when the device refuses to play other video files, it will play .ISO files just fine.
- The issue is independent of where the video files are stored. Even if you are trying to play the video files from the local hard drive in a WD TV Live Hub or from a USB attached drive on a WD TV Live SMP, the symptoms persist.
- If you shut down the Seagate BlackArmor NAS or simply disconnect its ethernet cable while you boot up your WD TV Live device, the symptoms will appear to be resolved for up to 30 minutes. Even if you plug the NAS back in after the WD has booted up, things will seem to be fine for a while before the symptoms suddenly reappear.
That last point makes troubleshooting extremely frustrating because a reliable test of any attempted fix/workaround takes close to an hour to properly validate.
The Workaround:
In searching the web, I found several reports of similar symptoms (including this thread) without anyone reporting a confirmed fix or workaround. I believe I have finally worked out a solution that should work for most people. The only people that it will not work for are those who are using Dynamic DNS services with their NAS.
1) This workaround requires you to enable SSH access to your Seagate BlackArmor NAS. Hajo Noerenberg has written a tutorial to accomplish this here:
http://www.noerenberg.de/hajo/pub/seagate-blackarmor-nas.txt
2) Once you are able to SSH into your NAS, you need to edit the "/etc/init.d/rcS" script and comment out the line that calls the "/usr/bin/nic_ip_mon.sh" script.
3) After you've made the change, reboot the NAS and then reboot your WD TV Live devices.
That's it. That should fix the problem. It may also break your dynamic DNS setup... assuming it even worked properly to begin with. I have validated this with two devices (a WD TV Live SMP and a WD TV Live Hub) streaming file after file for two straight hours without any symptoms reappearing. I then rebooted the WD TV Live Hub again and continued streaming for another 30+ minutes without any issues.
Analysis:
So what was happening in the first place? I can only speculate because I've wasted a ridiculous amount of time just getting this far. A complete answer would require me enabling ssh on the WD TV Live and my motivation is running low now.
What I do know is that the /usr/bin/nic_ip_mon.sh script is supposed to check your BlackArmor's internal IP and your network's external IP address periodically in order to update the dynamic DNS information for your NAS. To do so, it uses a test utility from the MiniUPnP Project called "upnpc". This tool is supposed to identify a UPnP Internet Gateway Device on your network and query it for redirection information including the external IP. It queries this information frequently and is supposed to update dynamic DNS when it changes but the script is horribly written and doesn't accomplish what it is meant to do unless you have a network configured in a very specific way. Now, I don't know if the symptoms on the WD would disappear if your network configuration happened to match what Seagate's amateur shell scripters had in mind when they wrote this garbage, but that's irrelevant.
Seagate can't take all of the blame here either. I have no idea what is happening on the WD side of the fence but they screwed something up so badly that an unauthenticated network peer can cause a denial of service. If anybody else wants to take this information to Seagate and/or Western Digital to try and get them to fix their junk, please do. At any rate, things are working for me right now and hopefully this will help the rest of you in a similar situation.
