Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Reviving Twonky Media on WD My Book Live

I have a 2 TB WD My Book Live NAS drive for storage of backups and media. I love that I can write to it faster (about 45 MB/s using robocopy) than a local USB 2.0 external drive (under 30 MB/s). However, I have loathed the device, too, since the music, video and pictures I stored on it were not showing up in DLNA client software (e.g. my PS3, NetGear MP-101, Macs and PCs). The server was visible to all, but it appeared to have no media files to serve.

I confirmed the basics of the configuration multiple times. Twonky Media was enabled. Each share was flagged as sharing all media file types. I restarted the service, rebuilt the database, rescanned the device. Nothing changed. After googling, I discovered I could connect to the NAS box with ssh. There were many recommendations to do this, rename two files, then restart Twonky Media. I did so with no change in behavior. However, after a little digging, I discovered a problem with the Twonky Media configuration. Once I changed that, everything started working.

The steps I followed were:

Login to the MyBook Live at http://mybooklive/UI/login
Enable SSH at http://mybooklive/UI/ssh
Connect via ssh (username = root, password = welc0me)
cd /CacheVolume/twonkymedia
vi twonkymedia-server.ini
change contentbase=/ to contentbase=/shares
save and exit
restart twonky at http://mybooklive:9000/config under Maintenance

Depending on your network, browser and ssh client, you may need to use a numeric IP address rather than "mybooklive". If you use Windows and don't have an ssh client, I recommend putty, which is what I used.