Well, after some considerable experimentation and frustration at getting Twonky to look for different media types in each of the different shared Media folders, I’ve come to a fairly unsurprising conclusion.
The MyCloud _ insists _ on creating the following folders for shared media:
/Public/Shared Music
/Public/Shared Pictures
/Public/Shared Videos
[edit] 2015/02/24: Actually, it’s Twonky that creates these folders.
I shouldn’t have put my media in the ‘Shared Media’ folders; these appear to be intended for Twonky to store media it copies from other libraries when working on ‘AutoCopy Aggregation’ mode. The trouble is that these appear the first time the MyCloud is turned on, so it looks like that’s where your supposed to put your media: you’re not…
Using the following folders to store my media seems to make it work properly:
/Public/Music All
/Public/Pictures Photos
/Public/Videos Videos
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If you rename them, it re-creates them whenever it re-starts*. This annoyed me when I first got the MyCloud. But, whilst I generally like to be in control of what my filesystems are called, I gave in, and accepted this enforced structure.
However, I note the space in the path name. Now, the NAS is a Linux box. And Twonky runs under Linux. And Unix of all flavours is well known for its dislike of spaces in pathnames. So I began to expect that this space was the root cause of all the problems I was having.
My experience of setting Twonky’s shares to search for media as follows:
/Public/Shared Music - Music only
/Public/Shared Pictures - Photos only
/Public/Shared Videos - Videos only
was that it would go off and create the database, but if you tried to stream any of that media, it refused, and eventually, the list of content dropped back to zero. Something was confused, and it could not be corrected without an SSH login & deletion of the entire /CacheVolume/twonkymedia directory. I wrote a script to save the .ini, delete the directory, make a new one and copy the saved .ini back. Yes; I was doing it that often whilst experimenting…
So I created another folder to test this theory:
/Public/Shared_Videos
I put a few videos in it, and set Twonky to search it for videos.
Bingo! No more problems!
So I’ve now renamed the folders to remove the pointless 'Shared ’ part (since it’s on ‘/Public’, it’s obviously shared…), and fully expect Twonky to behave from now on.
It’s searching /Public/Music at the moment, and I’m still able to stream media.
Frankly, it’s a schoolboy error to create folders with pathnames containing spaces on a linux system, without protecting them with quotes. But then, so is failing to back up twonkyserver.ini before a firmware upgrade, and restore it after the upgrade, before restarting Twonky. But that’s exactly what the MyCloud firmware upgrade process does… I may seek out the upgrade script and try to bend it to my will (i.e. do the right thing and save/restore the Twonky ini file). I’ve turned off automatic updates in the meantime.
* Ha! I just went back to /Public to create empty /Shared Media folders to keep MyCloud happy. Only to find that it had already recreated its beloved folders… I’ll just have to accept that it leaves unwanted droppings on MY filesystem.
My conclusion to this episode? This:
[edit 2015/02/24]
Some better explanation of how Twonky works is probably needed, to stop people putting their media where it seems ‘sensible’. See my FAQ link in the edit of the first post.
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