Thursday, November 4, 2010

Little Victories... WDTV Still Working Solidly with a Wireless Connection.

When I first networked my WDTV using a wireless connection, I used an old Belkin Wireless-G adapter. It worked fairly well, it would stream standard-definition xvid files (and occasionally a well encoded 720p file) and music without to much issue. However, the longer the connection remained open, the slower my WDTV would get, the interface would just get sluggish. Furthermore, I would eventually lose the connection all together....

Not so with my D-Link DWA-140 Wireless-N adapter! My WDTV has been running for a week straight now and everything is working beautifully. I still have my connection and the interface is still snappy. I can still see all of my network shares as well and my bittorrent RSS feed is still working. I plan on running this for another week to make sure everything is completely air tight, after which I will work on the next tutorial vid which will teach you how to share files using network shares and FTP, both of which are necessary for my method of getting bittorrent up and running!

Good things to come! Keep checking back for the next tutorial release!

P.S. - The latest tutorial (How to Network Your 1st Generation WDTV...Wireless!) just went live today on Youtube. My audience here however, had access a week early! I plan on doing this with all future video releases. So if you check this site out regularly, you will get access to new material and how-to videos first!

7 comments:

  1. can this be used with D-Link DWA-125?

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  2. Sorry to take so long to get back with you. My recent obsession has been minecraft and it takes away most of my free time :)...

    In short, probably not... My tutorial video more than likely won't work with a DWA-125...

    Long answer... my best guess would be that you COULD get it to work, but you will most likely need a different set of drivers and the appropriate config files to go with them...

    If by chance the DWA-125's chipset works with the same drivers as the DWA-140.... then it could work. Try it out and get back with me :)... I am sure there are other visitors to the site who would also like to know :)...

    Cheers,
    Roman

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  3. Hi, Roman,

    This is highly appreciated if you can help for setup my WDTV gen1 with wireless.

    I have the following things on hand and just follow your tutorial to setup the wireless function but still unsucessful.

    1) WDTV Gen1
    2) D-Link DWA-140 Ver B
    3) TP Link N router.
    4) Using the 1.03.01_B-RAD.CC_WDLXTV-0.5.8.1 from BRD

    I have modified the Net.config as follow and try both DHCP and Static IP but the WDTV still cannot get any ip address about firmware upgrade.

    The System information shown the Firmware upgrade sucessfully but still disply no IP and the DW140 light has not Flashing as expected.

    Here is the my Net.config.
    #You can override the hostname here:

    HOST=wdtv

    # if you do not set a hostname,a random one is assigned.

    # attempt to set jumbo frames
    MTU=1500

    #
    # Dynamic IP Configuration:

    DHCP=yes

    #
    # Static IP Configuration: (only if not DHCP)

    #DHCP=no
    #IP=192.168.1.5
    #GW=192.168.1.1
    #NM=255.255.255.0
    #DNS1=192.168.1.1
    #DNS2=192.168.0.1

    #
    # Optional:

    #specify time server host
    #NTP=pool.ntp.org

    #specify timezone
    #TZ=PST8EDT

    #one of rt61sta.dat, rt73sta.dat, RT2400.dat, RT2500STA.dat, RT2570STA.dat, RT2870STA.dat (used by rt3070 as well)
    WLAN_CFG=RT2870STA.dat
    #one of rt61.ko, rt73.ko, rt2400.ko, rt2500.ko, rt2570.ko, rt2870sta.ko, rt3070sta.ko
    WLAN_LOAD=rt3070sta.ko
    #need to bring up device?
    WLAN_UP=yes
    #time to sleep while waiting for wireless association
    WLAN_SLEEP=1

    P.s. I also changed the RT2870STA file accordingly.

    Please kindly advice and highly #You can override the hostname here:

    HOST=wdtv

    # if you do not set a hostname,a random one is assigned.

    # attempt to set jumbo frames
    MTU=1500

    #
    # Dynamic IP Configuration:

    DHCP=yes

    #
    # Static IP Configuration: (only if not DHCP)

    #DHCP=no
    #IP=192.168.1.5
    #GW=192.168.1.1
    #NM=255.255.255.0
    #DNS1=192.168.1.1
    #DNS2=192.168.0.1

    #
    # Optional:

    #specify time server host
    #NTP=pool.ntp.org

    #specify timezone
    #TZ=PST8EDT

    #one of rt61sta.dat, rt73sta.dat, RT2400.dat, RT2500STA.dat, RT2570STA.dat, RT2870STA.dat (used by rt3070 as well)
    WLAN_CFG=RT2870STA.dat
    #one of rt61.ko, rt73.ko, rt2400.ko, rt2500.ko, rt2570.ko, rt2870sta.ko, rt3070sta.ko
    WLAN_LOAD=rt3070sta.ko
    #need to bring up device?
    WLAN_UP=yes
    #time to sleep while waiting for wireless association
    WLAN_SLEEP=1


    P.s. I have modified the RT2870STA accordingly.

    Please kindly advice and appreciate your help.
    Denis

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ok, do you have a revision B1 or B2 adapter? That would be the first place to start.

    Check the back of your DWA-140 again and see what version you have for sure.

    You just specified that you have a B... but the number after the letter is what is important. If all your unit says is "Revision B" or "Rev B" or whatever... just the "B"... then it is probably a B1 and you should be using this line

    WLAN_LOAD=rt2870sta.ko

    Check that first (try it) and get back with me... tell me if you adapter at least starts blinking.

    If the adapter starts blinking, but you still don't get an IP address, then the next thing to start looking at will be your RT2870STA.dat file.

    Hope this solves it, if not, post again :)

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  5. Oh... and if this doesn't solve it, tell me what country you are in... this sometimes changes a few odd settings in the rt2870.dat file...

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  6. I have my wdtv modded with wdlxtv and also using a DWA-140.
    I am curious if anyone has it streaming any 1080p content, I can get 720p to work perfectly but have not been able to get any 1080 to work..

    thanks

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Andrew...

    Well... the answer is "yes" and "no"...

    I have gotten hi-def stuff to stream pretty smoothly (over wireless-g even... i think :)...) but I was using NFS not SAMBA... The problem with NFS that I had was that it isn't nearly as stable as with Samba, and it is much harder to setup because you have to install third party server software in windows.

    With all that being said, NFS is MUCH faster than SAMBA because it is native to Linux (what the box is based off of). But in the interest of helping everyone get setup pretty easily I stuck with just doing SAMBA... I believe with NFS that 1080p material would probably stream smoothly over wireless-N. If you are interested in looking into it on your own... i was using Hanewin, it is a free NFS server for windows. It isn't very straightforward to setup and in my opinion isn't very stable, but it is fun to play with and it is much faster than SAMBA...

    If you get it working and it is stable (as defined by me... running for 1-week without the computer or the WDTV having to be reset, streaming content at least twice a day during that period)... Please tell me about it, I haven't tried it with my DWA-140 yet.

    Cheers,
    Roman

    ReplyDelete