Hi All
I’d like to know the list of all “WDTV Live” compatible Media servers and experiences.
You can see some of them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPnP_AV_MediaServers#Software
-DR
I have tried the following:
TVersity: Installation was easy but I had a problem with it playing “avi” files of all things. Avi files would stutter very badly and were unwatchable. Avi files played fine using other Media Servers.
WMP: Seemed to work ok, but very frustrating. I would add a file to the library and it would not show up in the library but then would be in library the next morning. I never could understand what was going on so I quit using it.
PlayOn: Works great except for local files which I would have problems with disconnecting particularly mp4 files. Would not play “mkv” files. Works with Hulu, but uses quite a bit of system resources when doing so.
TwonkyMedia: Works flawlessly with all file types. But it has little internet services.
So I run PlayOn for Internet Services and Hulu, and I run TwonkyMedia for local files; I run them together on the same machine with no problem. I turned off the WMP service on my Win7 machine that I had these two installed on.
PlayOn and TwonkyMedia are both $40 but generally they have a special on for $20. TwonkyMedia has a $20 special until the end of the month.
Thx “WEAVER4”.
TVersity: I am currently using it.
Good:
- Plays AVI, MKV, DIVX well for me.
- It’s good for on the-fly transcoding like live internet TV.
- It plays RSS feed / Podcast contents very well. But I dont know why some RSS feeds are not playing.
Bad:
- It is not playing the fly flash content (I’m still investigating about it).
- Server is going down if windows loging session is idle for couple of hours.
- Less help, poor error messages.
WMP: I dont know what it is? Could you please give me thier URL?
PlayOn:
Good:
- It’s good one with having NetFlix, YouTube, Hulu and other stuf like this.
- Custom Plugin feature (I dont know wheather we can have RSS feeds on this custom plugins).
Bad:
- No on fly transcoding.
- Uses lot of system resources.
TwonkyMedia:
Can we play on fly transcoding?
There are other following Media servers I’m gonna try. I’ll post my experiences.
-
TVMOBiLi
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PS3 Media Server
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MediaTomb
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FUPPES
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JamCast
-DR
When I say WMP I was refering to Window’s 7 Windows Media Player. WMP acts as an interface for Windows 7 media sharing service.
TWonky media will transcode on the fly.
Are you runing Windows or Linux. I think most of my networking problems (and maybe my TVersity-avi problem) is related to networking issues between Win7 and WDTV-Live. It is hard enough to get Ubuntu to talk to Win7 let alone some $150 embedded linux box.
I ask because I see you are looking at MediaTomb; which I think is Linux only.
I think the most popular ones are: WMP, PlayOn, Twonky Media and TVersity.
BTW: If you are into podcast feeds the Script/Plugin for PlayOn works very well.
My OS is Windows Media Centre Edition.
I didn’t know that MediaTomb runs only on Linux.
Will PlayOn transcode on the fly?
-DR
On the Mac side, there’s Twonky Media which is expensive and it’s only advantage is transcoding which isnt needed on the WD HD Live. My favorite is Yazsoft’s Playback which has the advantages of serving iTunes and iPhoto LIbraries and for me greatly improved Playback of large HD MKV and TS files on the WD HD Live. No servers I know of on the Mac are nearly as complete as PlayOn or TVersity with their Internet services. :-(
PlayOn will transcode on the fly.
For Linux users, Media Tomb is probably the media server of choice. It’s available in Ubuntu’s repositories and probably in other distribution repositories too.
It has a simple and effective web interface and works well with the WDTV Live for video and music files. Installation is straightforward. It’s easy to setup a custom directory structure to organize media, on top of existing “containers” that present the media in a sorted fashion (by date, album, etc.).
It is supposed to be able to transcode on the fly using VLC but I could not make it work. Advanced configuration is done by editing an XML config file, which is tedious and error-prone.
Media Tomb is able to act as a proxy for online content: it can download a stream to a FIFO on disk and present the FIFO to the WDTV Live as a playable file. This works but only on well-behaved streams, such as direct links to an audio file for example. Some stream servers don’t recognize Media Tomb as a player and don’t give it the stream.
The only major bug is probably on WDTV Live’s side because reports of this problem using other media servers abound: the WDTV Live seems to load a thumbnail of photos instead of the actual pictures, so that picture browsing is better done through network shares than Media Tomb.
Tversity will work fine but you need to change the settings.
Under the server settings change it to
Never Transcode & type to File system
With those settings it uses about 45MB ram and almost no cpu time.
After you start the server running you do not have to keep the interface running. The server and interface are separate.
When you share a folder or add things to new folders you have to refresh the shares manually, it doesn’t seem to do it itself.
I tried all the ones out , about 16 of them , and chose tversity because of ease of use and it using low resources. Some of them like Twonky wanted to have 5 apps and servers running.
The problem I have with TVersity is that is does not play avi’s well.
For some reason avi movies played on TVersity are very, very slow; completly unwatchable. I have Transcoding turned off. The same videos play perfectly using Windows Media Center.
I agree with you on Twonky, uses too many resources. But, it is the only one that works with avi, mp4 and mkv files.
If WD would ever get mp4’s working again I could live with Windows Media Center.
I used Tversity for a long time . But now I installed Wild Media server ( http://www.wildmediaserver.com) and I like it. There is special profile for WD TV Live. I can open MKV, M2TS , FLAC files from server, IPTV and internet radio.
Anyone try Mezzmo?
J River Media Center has a DLNA / UPNP server that works very well with WD TV Live, although not free.
After playing with the Wild Media Server for a few hours I have to agree that this is a pretty good media server for bringing local content to the WDTV-Live box. And they even have a profile for the WDTV-Live box. Plus it does not appear to use many resources; thats nice.
imoroz84 wrote:
I used Tversity for a long time . But now I installed Wild Media server ( http://www.wildmediaserver.com) and I like it. There is special profile for WD TV Live. I can open MKV, M2TS , FLAC files from server, IPTV and internet radio.
Thanks for that. I have installed Wild Media Server and can recommend it. You can use MKVmerge to attach an image to the mkv stream and it shows up on the screen therefore doing away with the separate jpg files. Marvellous.
(The server is a trial which is expires June, 1st 2010)
I am using Wild Media Server for a week now. And somebody beaten me to report it!
It is better than TVersity as it can serve MKV files flawlessly. As mentioned above version 0.72 has a EDTV HD Live profile which you can select from settings.
Another nice feature is that you can access all your drives without sharing them, yes without sharing! in the start menu just click on the last button (for some reason it is written in Russian) and you can access all your PC files!
I just installed Wild Media Server and I cant see it my WD TV Live media server’s list.
-DR
Maybe server is not started ? Try to swith on Web server and open it from other PC, or localy.
Thums Up fot Wild Media Server. Perfect marriage with WDTV LIve. Bye Bye Network issues. WDTV Live can delay their firmware by another YEAR. Or make another firware which update the update which will update the way it updates the firmware and hibernate.
The author of Wild Media Server said he is willing to support: “new features (DVD, BD Menu, external subtitles)” if WD would be willing to work with him.
How do we make that happen?
