I use the WD TV LIVE as a HTPC front-end. Because of latency problems with my wireless network, I attached a USB stick to the WD TV LIVE to use for video storage. The player allows me to expose that USB stick to the network via “Windows” (Samba) file sharing. I would push video to it from my media server after hours, so it would be ready to watch the following day. I tended to move the files via shell scripts kicked off by cron jobs (or other triggers), or via SSH.

Now I have a new wifi network (802.11n), and I can stream almost all content to the WD TV LIVE directly from the media server. Bandwidth and latency are a problem, however, with very large files, such as 1080p video and Blu-Ray rips. To handle this content, I still have to transfer it to local storage on the WD TV LIVE front-end.

Install Samba File System

The most transparent way to connect to a samba share it to mount it to a mount point on your filesystem. To do so, you need to install the Samba File System (smbfs).

$ sudo apt-get install smbfs

Mount the Samba Share

You mount the samba share like any other hard drive. First, create the mount point, which is simply a folder.

$ mkdir ~/wdtvlive

Next, mount the share to the mount point. Note that I’m using the host name, instead of the IP address. You can use the IP address, or configure your server to allow the use of host names. Note the use of options following the -o argument. Your security needs may differ.

$ sudo smbmount //WDTVLIVE/32GB_STICK ~/wdtvlive -o guest,rw

Now you can use the folder ~/wdtvlive to browse the fire share. The file share is now part of the file system, so utilities such as rsync will work with it as it it was a local folder.

You can unmount the share via the following command:

$ sudo smbumount ~/wdtvlive

Optional: Permanently Mount the Samba Share

To mount a Samba share permanently, you have to add a line to the server’s file system table. First, edit the FSTAB:

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

Next, add a line, as follows. Note that the file system type is “cifs”, for “Common Internet File System”. The other options essentially set security wide open on the drive, which is acceptable for my use case, but certainly not for every one.

//WDTVLIVE/32GB_STICK /home/mjdescy/wdtvlive cifs guest,rw,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Then, save and close the file. Finally, remount all drives.

$ sudo mount -a

Now your file share will be mounted in the file system, and it will be persistent between server reboots.