DLNA not playing videos

What a frustrating evening!!

I bought a My Cloud 3TB drive today to free up space on my laptop HD.  After hooking the drive to the router, I updated the firmware to v03.01.03-127 & copied over about a dozen video files from my laptop to the MyCloud drive (AVI & MP4). 

I have a VIERA E50 Smart TV which I use the DLNA option to stream videos to watch.  After copying over the dozen videos, they show up on the list (viewing my from TV) & they have a thumbnail of the video & then an exclamation mark to the right of the thumbnail.  Only one of the video files will play on the TV (the MP4), the rest simply come up with the error message “Cannot Read File”.  I use my laptop to view the files on the MyCloud drive & i can play/watch them from my laptop.

The files that I copied are still on my laptop hard drive.  I then use the DLNA option on my TV to watch the very same files from my laptop media server & they play with no issues.  Why won’t they play from the MyCloud server?  I bought the MyCloud drive specifically to load all my media on it & free up laptop space…Any ideas or help?

You need to check your TV specs to see if it supports the file types you are trying to play over DNLA.

The most likely reason they want play is because your TV does not support those media types over DNLA, and the reason that they will play from your laptop is because your laptop media server is transcoding the files.  The NAS does not transcode videos so your TV has to natively support that file type.

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Just scanning the net, I see a few posts on DLNA that do indicate that the Viera E50 series is substantially limitted in DLNA capabilities.

Doesn’t support h.264 profiles higher than 4.1 in any container, doesn’t support AVI at all, doesn’t support DTS, etc, but it’s very dependendent on the subseries model and year of production.

No wonder that DMR profiles in various DLNA servers are out of whack.

Here’s a post on Serviio’s forum, for example:

http://forum.serviio.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=6935

The Twonky server in the Cloud doesn’t do transcoding, so you’ll probably have to transcode videos manually to get them to work on the Panasonic.

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Thanks for the info!

I am fairly new to having a smart TV & a NAS device.  Is there a site or instructions on how I can transcode videos manually?  Is it easy or tough to do?  Thanks again!

TheRealConcrete wrote:

Is there a site or instructions on how I can transcode videos manually?

Gazillions of them.   You’ll have to start with getting intimately familiar with what formats your TV supports before you expend a lot of effort and time doing transcoding.