This describes how I got my BeyonWiz DP-S1 to play movies off my PC (USB attached portable enclosure). I had previously unsuccessfully tried getting a NAS drive to attach to the BeyonWiz and failed but have since found out it is known to be incompatible with it.To start with the BeyonWiz is hopeless with its error messages and this is where all the problems come from, you never have a clue where its gone wrong.
This is my environment:
- LinkSys WRT54GL router with Tomato "1.21" firmware.
- Netcomm NP285 HomePlug adapters (ethernet over power) for my remote connection to the BeyonWiz.
- BeyonWiz DP-S1 on firmware "01.05.261".
- WinXP SP3
My USB attached drive with the movies is "T:" with my movied in the "T:\$Movies$" tree so I right clicked on "$Movies$" and opened the properties at the "Sharing" tab (simple networking must be turned off for the tab to appear).
You want to "Share this Folder", and I chose "MultiMedia" as the share name. I changed the share permissions by adding "MultiMedia" and giving it only read-access as I don't want to accidently have someone on the BeyonWiz (my daughter perhaps) deleting the movies. I also did the same for the file permissions ("Security" tab).
To get the BeyonWiz to attach to the PC you choose the "Scan" option (49% for the BeyonWiz means the same as 100% for normal people). If this fails there may be firewall or other issues, its worth trying the "Find PC" option, if this also fails, its worth knowing that the BeyonWiz needs to see visible share(s) on the PC for it to "find" the PC.
Up until now I don't think user names, passwords or user permissions matter at all, just that a PC with at least one share is visible. Now if you navigate into the share and see no files one of these items is likely to be incorrect. At this stage I don't think the BeyonWiz recovers very well so between tests remove PCs (yellow button) and rescan or find PC, I have also had to do this after setup so BeyonWiz share handling doesn't appear to be very "flash".
If you can't see eveything under the share (folders or files) check the permissions of these objects, when setting permissions on the "root" folder its best to go to the advanced tab and check "Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects" and click apply (then check again)!
While I was having problems I turned off my PC's software firewall as well as relaxed the hardware firewall in my router, at the end of the day it wasn't causing problems but thats an easy way to determine if they are the cause.
Now there appears to be a Windows Bug which will cause problems with sharing removeable drives, basically your share gets deleted after a reboot (Linux is looking better every day...). My solution was to:
- Create a batch file containing "net.exe share MultiMedia=T:\$Movies$".
- To handle reboots where the drive is attached (you may or may not have it permanently attached) create a shortcut to the batch file in the "Startup" folder to have it automatically launched at user logon.
- To handle cases where the drive wasn't connected at boot time, use Microsoft's "Tweak UI" tool to create an "autoplay" handler (look under "My Computer") and then edit the drives properties and choose the new handler for all content types. When testing this put a "pause" in the batch file as it took me a few goes to even get it to invoke the batch file, my command was: cmd.exe /c ""C:\SomeDir\Share_T_DRIVE.cmd" "%L""
Some resources:
- BeyonWiz Networking Forum (ask questions or read the "sticky" tips)
- BeyonWiz Guides: (How connect to shared files on Windows / How do I play a file on the network)
Hopefully that has helped you! One other thing, I don't know if its required but after each failed test, I turned the BeyonWiz off then on to be 100% sure it was reset.
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