I’ve helped a friend replace his My Book Live because he needed more storage space. However, he is complaining that his DLNA devices now require more clicks to access videos.
On a Samsung Smart TV, five different screens have to be navigated to access videos:
Content Type: Videos, Photos, Music. He chooses Videos.
Music, Photo, Video, Storage. He chooses videos again.
Album, By Date, Folder, Actor, All Video etc. He chooses Folder.
Public. He chooses Public
Music, Video. He chooses Video. All his videos are then displayed.
He told me that before I replaced his My Book Live, he only had to click through a couple of screens. I’ve checked the folder structure on the My Book Live and the Video folder is in the root directory of the main ‘share’ so there aren’t any extra folders.
I told my friend that if he clicks ‘Storage’ on the second screen, he has fewer screens to click through but he’s still not happy with me.
The old My Book had Twonky for DLNA streaming but this new one uses WD DLNA Server. Is this the reason? Does WD DLNA Server broadcast the directory structure in a different way to the old Twonky?
Looks like the WD DLNA version didn’t get improved over the standard DLNA. I have the same problem but with music files when going thru Twonky’s “By Folder” instead of “genre/album”. Someone posted a reply to my posting about the “depth of dlna” saying that for him, it was the 255 byte limit for the path/filename.
The problem really shouldn’t be the path/filename limit but the method that DLNA goe thru the “structure” to the file itself. Notice the multiple times the the “videos” must be selected & that somehow the selection process brought one back to the “Public” directory! I’ve played videos which it does, BUT going back up thru the directory structure from the video subdirectories, I get an error which is a “known” error that hasn’t been resolved by the whoever dictates/defines how DLNA works.
Actually, using Twonky’s structure to get videos is much more straight forword than music! But the error to get to another video genre (in my case) produces the error which stops access to Twonky completely from my blu-ray player; the only way to fix, I think, was to turn-off the player for a while before turning it back on.
Your posting tells me the WD DLNA (and so “standard” DLNA) is junk & won’t work for me on my MyBookLive. And as the new WD models only have WD DLNA, I will have to check out other companies’ NAS to see what is used for media access or perhaps find a substitute software.
