I don’t recommend using SMBup. I found out about SMBup through this thread, and it cause me a fair bit of grief. While it will work (and is stupid easy to set up) all my large high bitrate movies were stuttering at some point. My network is full gigabit, so I was puzzled. I switched to OS X’s internal NFS sharing (linux style) and the stuttering went away. SMB just couldn’t handle it, and I had read several places that SMB doesn’t do well with large fast file transfers.
Read about my full story here. I describe in that post more about my setup, as well as the links I used to get NFS running under Lion.
I concur with Cheule. SMB is a ridiculously slow protocol and it may be less than optimal if you need a high-performance and reliable transfer. This is inherent of the protocol so every implementation will be as bad.
SMBUp is a front-end for Samba, which is installed on demand by the program. This means that all the limitations of Samba are present in this version as they were in Apple’s pre-Lion ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if this, besides all the license issues, was one of the things that convinced Apple to remove it from Lion and onwards.
NFS is much older than SMB but has always been a highly efficient protocol that streams files as fas as it possibly can. Another protocol in OS X that’s much better performance-wise is AFP (Apple’s own native file sharing protocol).
I provide SMBUp as a workaround for people that either need to use SMB1 or Samba for some reason or that really like it and prefer it. The instructions before SMBUp implied having to download macports, register as a developer and use xcode to compile a bunch of packages and it just seemed overkill, so SMBUp automates all those steps.
If you can use NFS then do. It’ll be better in the long run. If you can’t then Samba may work in a pinch, but won’t be very efficient over the network.
I don’t know how far the conversation has drifted away from ways to share from a Mac to the WD TV Live, but a free program for the Mac called EyeConnect works a treat for me. The problem is, as it is with all media servers, they don’t play subtitles. Balls.
