I went Alt-F - I like it

[Graeme Lockett]

Hi,

I upgraded my DNS-323 to Alt-F at the weekend. May I say I am impressed! All I need is a Samba server and a UPNP server to feed movies to the TV and here in lies my issue. I tried Ushare and man is it quick, the problem is that my TV then reports it doesn't support that file type [.mkv].

I then tried MediaTome. I like Media Tomb but it drives the CPU hard while finding files and it locked up twice, requiring a reboot and this caused two full disk checks. Mediatome allows me to play my movies without issue. I like the way it sorts movie and musis by folder and my type.

I also tried Fruppes. It sorts by folder and once again I found it slow and unresponsive.

Is there a way for UShare to fee .mkv files so that my Tv can play them. 

Anyone have any suggestions for me?

[João Cardoso]

On Sunday, March 16, 2014 8:04:45 PM UTC, Graeme Lockett wrote:

Hi,

I upgraded my DNS-323 to Alt-F at the weekend. May I say I am impressed! All I need is a Samba server and a UPNP server to feed movies to the TV and here in lies my issue. I tried Ushare and man is it quick, the problem is that my TV then reports it doesn't support that file type [.mkv].

I then tried MediaTome. I like Media Tomb but it drives the CPU hard while finding files and it locked up twice, requiring a reboot and this caused two full disk checks.

If you intend to keep using Alt-F convert the ext2 filesystem to ext3 or ext4 to speedup that disk checks: Disk->Filesystems (read the online help, the (?) icon)

 

Mediatome allows me to play my movies without issue. I like the way it sorts movie and musis by folder and my type.

I also tried Fruppes. It sorts by folder and once again I found it slow and unresponsive.

Is there a way for UShare to fee .mkv files so that my Tv can play them.  

Anyone have any suggestions for me?

You missed minidlna.

But if your TV doesn't plays .mkv you have to convert it yourself on your desktop PC to something the TV understands, as the dns-323 doesn't has the cpu power to do the transcoding to other formats.

 

[Robert Fargher]

On Sunday, March 16, 2014 8:04:45 PM UTC, Graeme Lockett wrote:

Is there a way for UShare to fee .mkv files so that my Tv can play them. 

  Does your Blu-Ray player have a uPNP/DLNA client?  Perhaps it might be able to play them.   If you don't have a Blu-Ray player, take a USB thumb drive with one of the Matroska video (.mkv) files on it when shopping for one to ensure that it will play them.

  I'm finding that minidlna doesn't work for me, not on my DNS-323, my PC (running Kubuntu) nor on my Asus RT-N66U router.  It never finishes the media scan, always barfing out long before scanning all the configured directories, whether they're on a NTFS or ext4 file system.  I'm fairly sure that it's balking at some characters in the file names but I can't find any documentation on minidlna anywhere that helps me.  There's nothing in the log file to indicate what's happening.  I'm giving UShare a shot now.

--
Cheers,
Rob

[Graeme Lockett]

Thanks for the replies. I updated my drives to EXT4 last night. I will try the minidlna package tonight, if not I guess I will need to go back to Fuppes. It seemed to work but didn't give the media back to me in a way that I like. I basically want to see movies and music by different categories.. [Not complaining]

 

I don't have any other devices, just the TV and the DNS323.

[Graeme Lockett]

Uninstalled ushare and installed minidlna. This appears to be the same package as what was on the dns323 originally except I can choose the folders to scan. I Like it! Noticed it crashe about 30 minutes later though error message "WARNING: Inotify max_user_watches [8192] is low or close to the number of used watches". I found this article and have applied the fixes. So far so good.

[Graeme Lockett]

minidlna keeps hanging at the same point it registers 384 files and hanges. No erros in the log and doesn't do anything else. The folder only contains .mkv files.

[Graeme Lockett]

Ran minidlna with the diagnostic option and found that the scan stopped on the same file each time. Movie plays in VLC but broke the scan for some reason. Deleted the file and the scan of movies completed.

Add a music directory to the scan and a similar thing happened with a itunes music file. Still working my way though it. It would be nice if it carried on with scanning instead of bombing out.

I might try mediatomb again. I noticed that you can't restart media tomb services, I can only kill the session ids via a putty connection to the SSH server. Looks like both Fuppes and Mediatomb are not maintained anymore. Is there another option for Alt-F?