GoFlex Net & GoFlex Home

[dvenyce]

Maybe someone can help me. I purchase the go flex home 3Tb network drive and hooked up my 1TB wd hard drive to the usb port. I can see the files on my WD 1TB hard drive when I go on my computer, but for some reason when I use my google tv, Sony Playstation or Smart blue ray player it doesn’t see the WD Drive. All my music and videos are on that drive. How do I configure it to see it?

[ntpntpntp]

The GF Home's DLNA service needs to know to look on that external drive and index the contents. The usual way to do that with stuff on the GF Home's own drive is to use the Seagate Dashboard software, launch Seagate Share and set up shares which have the "share with media devices" option ticked.

To be honest I've never tried setting up such shares to stuff on an external drive plugged into the GF Home's USB port so I don't know if it's possible, and anyway in the end I found it easier to configure the DLNA service how I wanted it by gaining root terminal access to the GF Home and editing the DLNA config file directly.  Since doing that I've never needed to touch Seagate Share again.

[dvenyce]

Thanks, but I don't know how to root my device so I guess I will try the 1st option.

[kenji57]

Type   //goflex_home/   into a browser window on a computer on your LAN and you should get the Goflex web access page.

log in, go to Seagate Shares and on any folder containing media that you want to share, hover the mouse to display a little arrow, click on that and select Share with Media Devices

[dvenyce]

Thank you kenji57  that worked. The onlything is that it only sees one sub folder and I have movie folders, music folder, picture folders etc. How can I set it so it can view all my folders on my external hard drive.

[kenji57]

I'm not sure what you mean. The way DLNA works is that it scans shared folders for media by file type and builds a database of files. DLNA doesn't care what the folders are called it just sorts the files in them by media type.

That is the same whether you are using Windows media player, Goflex minidlna or 3rd party media servers like Serviio, Twonky, Tversity etc.

For example, I also have music, pictures and video folders, but I have a couple of video files accidentally in my pictures folder and the Goflex includes them in my videos list. 

Edit: I just realized that you are talking about browsing the filesystem from your media players. In that case, you probably can't. The problem is with the media devices and not the Goflex.

PS3 I know can only read FAT32 formatted drives. There's talk of Google TV devices being able to read NTFS but it may require root access and replacing the firmware. The alternative is to format your Goflex drive to FAT32 but since your drive is 3TB that presents other issues

[dvenyce]

I didnt wait until all the folders were scaned. When I woke up this morning all my folders were on my google TV. Thanks

[ntpntpntp]

Yes, it can take quite a while for the DLNA service to do a full scan.   When I reboot my GF Home it easily takes 30-40 minutes to rebuild a list of something like 15000 media files.  I sometimes root into the GF Home and watch the DLNA service log as it does its work. 

I've found it's best NOT to attempt to connect any media players to the GF Home during this rebuild period: in the past I've seen evidence in the DLNA service log of database locks causing stuff to be left out of the list if something tries to read the list at the same time as it's rebuilding.