DLNA server setup help needed

valve90210

valve90210

valve90210

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Joined
17 Jan 2006
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Hi All

I'm just looking into DLNA servers and thinking about how I can best setup some of my kits for accessing media in a second room, and figured DLNA was the way forward but I'm a little confused...

Firstly, let me explain my system roughly:
Main room:
PC, Bluray Player, xbox360 and shortly a humax Fox T2 pvr, all connected up to a panasonic tv.

Second room:
Humax pvr, wdtv Live, Xbox running XBMC all connected to a cheap Goodmans tv.

When I get the Fox T2 in the lounge I want to hook it up to the network and as it can operate as a DLNA server, I would like to have the WDTV Live able to connect to it and, fingers crossed, play recordings over the network (if it can handle the files the humax creates...)

While I was thinking about all the DLNA stuff, I figured, If I set up my media library on my PC to be shared, then I could access it in the bedroom either using XBMC or the WDTV, which would save the hassle of having to copy files across to the xbox as I do at the moment.

However, I am a little stumped when it comes to setting Windows 7 up for media sharing...

I've done some searching and found a few guides which I have followed and it seems I've set it up ok ut for some reason the wdtv won't find the network (in fact I'm stuggling to get it to connect at all...) and doesn't come up on the list of devices that the video library is shared with...

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a really good guide on how to get this kind of thing working, or indeed think of anything I might be doing wrongly?

Any help much appreciated!!!
 
Last night I had another try at getting this working, again I followed the steps for setting up DLNA streaming, which is basically adding a video folder to my library, making sure library sharing was on, opened up window media centre and selected to allow it to stream and to automatically allow devices to access it.

I then opened up windows media centre on my laptop, however there was no sign of the shared videos in the library.

A quick look about in windows explorer showed a network connection to my main pc and the shared library so the laptop could see the files and could play them if I opened them from windows explorer but they didn't show up in windows media centre?

I then set the laptop up for sharing in exactly the same way and almost immediately on the main pc, the laptop showed up as an additional library on the left hand side of windows media player and I could play the shared videos.

I also installed bubbleupnp on my phone. It showed the laptop as a device and a library. I could send video to the laptop from my phone and I could watch video from the laptop on my phone. So that was clearly working.

However neither phone nor laptop could see the shared files from the main pc???

Also, my WDTV Live showed up on the laptop as a device on the network but not as a media player so it wasn't available as a selection in media player for playing to or from but could be connected to through the network...

I'm really puzzled as to why the sharing from my main pc doesn't seem to be working at all when the laptop is working perfectly and as far as I can see the only difference is that the laptop is set up for the network using DCHP and the main pc is manually setup for a fixed ip address and dns server (i'm using google dns server for it) My phone is setup this way too but is working fine...

Any one any thoughts?
 
I was wondering about giving plex or something a try, might give it a whirl this evening...

Though I am still puzzled why the laptop works fine and the main pc doesn't when the setup is basically the same...could the manual ip config be causing problems? Maybe I need to check out upnp stuff on the router?
 
With windows file sharing, sometimes you have to turn off passwords and encryption for some devices to work properly. Personally I found it was far too finicky and used PS3 Media Server instead which is very easy to get going and works great.
 
Having had a quick look at a couple of bits of software I think I'm gonna give Serviio a try as it seems nice and easy to get running.

Fingers crossed it'll get things working.
 
I use Mezzmo. They messed up the latest version (2.6.5) but they are reckoning on a fix for this before the end of the week. 2.6.3 works flawlessly though for me, and you get 2 weeks free trial before you need to commit. Think its 29USD for a license.
 
It took me a while to set it up too, i bought an android media stream the sumvsion cyclone nano brilliant little thing! but you need to goto Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network and Sharing Center\Media streaming options and make sure that nothing is being blocked. Also make sure these are on/off

Network discovery - ON
Password protected sharing - OFF

i set it the same for both HOME and PUBLIC, good luck hope that helps some.
 
Cheers for the reply guys, in the end I installed Serviio and set it up, seems to work perfectly, having checked with my blu-ray player and my xbox running xbmc, not triedit with my WDTV Live yet but fingers crossed that'll work too!

Then when my new Hummy arrives hopefully that'll be nice and easy to get working too., as that is my main reason for wanting to get it setup up so I can watch recordings made in the lounge while I'm in bed!!! :)
 
After my initial happiness with it, I'm having trouble with Serviio at the moment.

For some reason my WDTV Live initially sees the Serviio server and browses the folders really quickly and seems great. I hit play on any file and it springs to life really quickly.

However, after a couple of minutes, it stops playing and throws up a "cannot connect to server error". Once this has happened it can't see the Serviio server at all until I completely power cycle the WDTV.

I've tried everything I can think of, and asked for help on the WDTV forums and nothing so far has got it working properly and I'm completely stumped now.

I did try installing Plex to see if that worked but it seemsa bit odd to me and I couldn't work out where any detailed settings where for ensuring DLNA etc was setup right...but this was late last night so maybe I missed something obvious...

Has anyone else had any luck running Serviio with a WDTV live?
 
How is your WDTV connected, wifi or wired?

I have a similar issue using serviio and a Sony snp-100 but I am connected using homeplugs so am guessing my issue lies there...
 
WDTV is connected via a cat 5 cable to my secondary router which is working just as a switch and wireless access point (eveything else is disabled) which is connected to my main router modem by another cat 5 cable.

Also hooked up to the secondary router by a wire is my old Xbox running XBMC which streams from the Serviio server perfectly but won't play newer files which are in mp4 format, or anything that is HD as it doesn't support them.
 
Does the WDTV even need a DLNA server? I was under the impression you could just point it directly to your media shares.
 
It doesn't 'need' a DLNA server but if it was working it would be a much more simple method of getting it to work as network shares can be a bit unreliable with the WDTV.

It's irritating because a lot of people have them working perfectly with Serviio with no bother at all, and mine works really quickly and perfectly up until the point of playing a file, which initially works fine but then fails...
 
A few things you could try...

If you have transcoding enabled try both disabling it and also changing the number of cores it uses.

check the transcoding temp folder... I just checked mine and it seems the temp file is over 11GB maybe its running short on space?

Try a different ffmpeg version.
 
Hmmm, I'll give them a try, though really the files shouldn't need transcoding as the WDTV can play them perfectly when they are stuck on a USB stick and hooked up to the player itself...

Different ffmpeg version is certainly worth a try...
 
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