DNLA Thumbnails Squished at 160x160

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud Pro Series
1

Recently got the PR4100 as it uses Twonky for its DNLA and just a few months prior bought Twonky for my PC as I liked it and understood the config settings.

I guess its OK that the PR4100 Twonky config settings are not as robust as the full product, but I am having an issue with the generated Thumbnails. I have a mix of 16x9 and 4x3 content and on my Roku via the PC version of Twonky the thumbs look as expected - either full 16x9 or pillarboxed for the 4x3 content. But on the PR4100 all content is squished in from the sides and doesn’t look good.

Any suggestions on how to fix?

From the PC version of Twonky it was tweaking the ffmpeg-video-thumb.desc script. I don’t know linux all that well but was able to copy the .desc file to Public to see what the thumbnail settings are on the PR4100:

exec: ffmpeg_wrapper -loglevel quiet -ss $videothumbtime -i $infile -vframes 1 -y -f mjpeg -s $targetgeometry -aspect 1:1 $outfile

I read in another post to remove -s $targetgeometry -aspect 1:1 which might fix the issue.

I used WinSCP to connect and browse to the cgi-bin directory, but the file system is read-only so I can copy files from there but not to there.

Also looking in (via WinSCP) the thumbnail folder /mnt/HD/HD_a2/.twonkymedia/db/cache/images/ all thumbnails being created are 160x160 no matter the source content, 16x9 or 4x3, MP4 or MKV. That was not the case for the PC version of Twonky, which explains why everything looks squished - because at 160x160 it is. Not the correct aspect ratio for anything.

Has anyone updated the ffmpeg-video-thumb.desc file on their PR4100 or seen an issue like this?

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Twonky is part of the firmware. It is quite a bit of a hassle to modify it.
However you can make a separate app as follows (with SSH)

Copy twonky to your 3rd party app directory.

cp -r /usr/local/twonky /shares/Volume_1/Nas_Prog/twonky 
cd /shares/Volume_1/Nas_Prog/twonky

Edit the start script twonky.sh to point the workdir on line 32 to the new location.

WORKDIR1="/shares/Volume_1/Nas_Prog/twonky"

Disable the original twonky first (disable dlna media scanning) then start your own version.

twonky.sh start
ps fax | grep twonky

Now you can edit the files in cgi-bin all you like.

However, if you already have an official twonky license you can just install the latest twonky (instead of copying the firmware version).

cd /shares/Volume_1/Nas_Prog
rm -rf twonky
mkdir twonky && cd twonky
wget http://download.twonky.com/8.5.1/twonky-x86-64-glibc-2.22-8.5.1.zip
unzip twonky*.zip
cp /usr/local/twonky/twonky.sh

Setup your license key and you’re set…

Finally, you’d like twonky to start automatically when your NAS boots. There’s several ways to achieve this… a few searches here on the forum will resolve that.