Using my Mac as a netowrk drive

[eddjedi]

I just bought a Panasonic blu ray player, and one of the big selling points was the network drive option - basically you can read shared folders on your home network and play films from there. But I can't get it to work! I followed this guide to set up folder sharing on my videos folder:

http://www.trickyways.com/2011/07/file-sharing-mac-os-x-lion-and-pc-windows-7/

I then enabled internet sharing, and plugged the blu ray player into my Mac with an ethernet cable. The internet is definitely getting through - I can use the built in web services now. But for network drive, if I go to put in the IP, folder name, username and password, it just says connection failed. I can't find any Mac specific discussion on this at all. Any ideas what might be the problem?

 

[sampdoria]

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"plugged the blu ray player into my Mac with an ethernet cable"

Hmm, I believe you need to plug the blu ray player into your router instead of your Mac via ethernet cable (or Wi-Fi), and that way the router assigns the blu ray player its own IP address.

 

[eddjedi]

Thanks for the reply. That's not really an option unfortunately as my router is downstairs, and the mac/blu ray player are in the same room. So I'm using internet sharing to give the blu ray player internet over ethernet, from wi-fi. Hope that makes sense. Do you think there's a way of getting it to work?

 

[killerrobot]

Your above link is dead.

Double check that your settings are correctly selected in the Internet Sharing - "Share your connection from Airport" "To computers using ethernet".

Also double check that you don't have any mac filtering going on in the router that is blocking you BR player from connecting.

 

[sampdoria]

Thanks for the reply. That's not really an option unfortunately as my router is downstairs, and the mac/blu ray player are in the same room. So I'm using internet sharing to give the blu ray player internet over ethernet, from wi-fi. Hope that makes sense. Do you think there's a way of getting it to work?

Internet sharing is different than network sharing. Essentially the router is the hub of your network from which all devices are assigned a local IP address so that they can communicate with each other. I don't think that by plugging in your blu-ray player to your mac, the router would be able to assign it an IP address (but maybe it is possible). Otherwise, you're blu-ray player would have to connect to your router either by ethernet or wifi. I would think you're blu-ray player has built-in wifi, my Sony blu-ray player does. If it doesn't then get an AirPort Express (or similar) and plug the blu-ray into that, essentially giving the blu-ray wifi capabilities to communicate with your router directly.

 

[killerrobot]

Internet sharing is different than network sharing. Essentially the router is the hub of your network from which all devices are assigned a local IP address so that they can communicate with each other. I don't think that by plugging in your blu-ray player to your mac, the router would be able to assign it an IP address (but maybe it is possible).

Yes it is different. Internet sharing turns your Mac into a "network bridge" and allows you to share your internet connection with other devices connected to it. It behaves as the router and assigns an IP address.

@eddjedi - Two other things to check:
System Preferences>Network>Ethernet - make sure to have "using DHCP" selected for the Configure IPv4

System Preferences>Security & Privacy>Firewall>Advanced - make sure the box that says "Block all incoming connections" is unchecked.

EDIT: What model did you buy from Panasonic. It seems that for several of them the Network Drive feature is only supported for Windows XP, Vista and 7. Perhaps a call into their tech support could clarify.

 

[peterjcat]

I was never able to get Network Drive working on my UK BDT-110 and the Mac -- it would only work with a PC/NAS. It seems there was something about the Mac's Samba sharing that the Panasonic didn't like. Now that Lion uses its own SMB implementation instead of Samba things are probably even worse (though there's a small chance they could be better).

 

[pfalvey]

I've been having the same problem with my new panasonic bluray, bdt-210. Go through the menu > home network > media renderer. It's telling me that the source is turned off. I have sharing on my macbook pro enabled.