WD TV Live HD – Wlan
after I have moved into a new apartment it was not possible to connect by wire my mediaplayer. The only solution was to connect the WD TV live HD mediaplayer with a w-lan adapter with my homenetwork. But first off all I had to find the right w-lan adapter for my network and for the WD TV live HD mediaplayer. More about this in the following test report.
The first try was to connect the Western Digital mediaplayer with an old telecom speedport W500 router with my homenetwork. After a few tries I was able to connect the dsl router as a repeater with my w-lan homenetwork. But the transfer rate was so slow that the WD mediaplayer was not able to stream youtube videos. There was also the problem with a second device ( the old router ) which wasn’t nice to be placed in the living room.
WD TV LIVE HD D-LINK
On the homepage of Western Digital I searched for a list of USB wireless lan adapters that are supported by the WD TV Live Mediaplayer. With such a wireless lan adapter I wanted to connect my mediaplayer easily with my wireless lan homenetwork. Here is the link to the Western Digital support side with the list of supported usb wifi adapters.
D-Link Xtreme N – USB WIFI Adapter
I decided to buy the D-Link Xtreme N dual band usb adapter DWA-160. For me it was importand to buy an adapter with full WPA and WPA2 support to crypt my homenetwork transmissions.
When the WD mediaplayer boots the adapter will be recognized. But it takes a few seconds (approx 40 sec) to have full access to your homenetwork like a mediaserver.
Configuration of the DWA 160
[sam_zone id=”2″ codes=”true”]
To configure the DWA 160 wireless lan adapter on the mediaplayer is very simple. You only have to connect the adapter with the mediaplayer. Thats all you have to do. After this you have to connect the WD Live HD Mediaplayer with your homenetwork by configuaring the w-lan options. My password is very long so i needed a few tries to tipe the password correctly with the remote into the password field. It is also diffcult because you only see the last letter in clear text but not the whole string.
WD TV LIVE HD - WIFI EINRICHTEN
Transfer rate
I streamed a HD movie with 18 GB without any problems. But HD movies with approx. 30 GB are lagging and I stopped the stream because you can’t watch the movie. I think the real transfer rate was about 9 MB/sec. I will try to stream such a big movie with a usb hard drive to be sure the problem was the wlan transfer rate.
Conclusion
It was the right decision to buy an usb wifi w-lan adapter for my western digital mediaplayer. You do not have laying cables around your living room and the setup was very easy. The only negative I see is the very bright and blinking LED light from the D-Link DWA 160 W-Lan adapter. The led spoils the homecinema feeling a little bit. But the Wifi adapter comes with a extra usb cable and I hided the adapter behind the flatscreen.
WD TV LIVE HD WIFI LED
Hi Sash,
I have installed the firmware version 1.06.15_V on my Western Digital Live HD Media Player.
The D-LINK DWA-160 has the hardware version A2 and the firmware version 1.50(E)
I only pluged the DWA-160 into my western digital media player and could configure it.
I hope this information helps you to figure out your problem…
Can you advise me what version/revision and firmware the DWA 160 is. Seems a lot of people cant get it to work.
thanks