Folder accessing best practice

I have a WD TV live and a WD NAS and all works well.  I’m just after a bit of advice as to the best way to get quick acces to the movies.

I believe it’s not possible to shortcut to folders, so I went to the NAS media server and added the video folder to the media library and it worked fine.  I read somewhere that I should have added it as a network share instead, is that correct?

Secondly, I’ve only been using it few a couple of days.  I tried to watch a film tonight and noticed that most of the films had dissappeard from the NAS drive.  A few things may have had an effect:

  1. The mains poewr to the WD :Live got switched off butit was when it was in standby,not doing anything.

  2. WHen originally copying the files fomr the PC to the NAS, it got disconnected and windows resumed copying one of the files after an error.  The last film I was weatching was the one is got snagged whilst copying.

Could either of thoe caused the films to drop form the NAS or could it be something else?  It seems a little odd that, perhaps one bad file, could cause the other 10 to get deleted too from teh NAS drive?

Thanks in advance

   I read somewhere that I should have added it as a network share instead, is that correct?

Many of us find that accessing via Network shares works best, since not all media can be played via Media server route, e.g. ISO files can only be played via Network shares.  If you have trouble setting up network shares come back for assist, and take a look at the very first post here: 

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Streaming/How-to-resolve-Network-shares-access-problems/m-p/551112#M19218

mike27oct wrote:

   I read somewhere that I should have added it as a network share instead, is that correct?

 

Many of us find that accessing via Network shares works best, since not all media can be played via Media server route, e.g. ISO files can only be played via Network shares.

For the record, the formats that can by played over DLNA are dependent on the media server. I use MyMedia from MediaMall (PlayOn) and ISO files work just fine. That said, I am in agreement with Mike that network shares are a much better method of accessing your media from a WD device.

-P

As others have said, it’s better to use “Network Shares” and avoid DLNA (Media Server).

This article explains why you should avoid DLNA:

Why do I hate DLNA protocol so much ?

Quote from the article:

“for each file, the DLNA server has to first demux it, in order to retrieve its A/V and container information, so that it knows whether or not it complies with an existing profile. If it does not and you still want it to be streamed, than the server has to either remux it (best case ever) if it’s enough, or remux and re-encode it on the fly (worst case ever) to a valid profile so that player can read it. Of course, doing so on-the-fly consumes a lot of CPU power, which is, by definition, not available, making it impossible to do on embedded devices, which were the target of DLNA inventors.”

A NAS cpu is not equipped to decode heavy video files, much less it can do a good job re-encoding them on the fly.

Even if you have the cpu/gpu power from a computer, if  DLNA needs to re-encode, it will lose the original quality.

WDTV Live SMP has hardware support for decoding the video files with quality.

Pearl, don’t ISO files served by MyMedia need to be processed by a program on the PC for them to work on a WDTV?  If so, then using network shares on the WD might be better because the WD does the decoding of the raw ISO file, right?

edit:  message above came in while I was writing this one, and it seems I was on the same track as Mr Wolf.

Keep playing of ISOs simple, and use network shares.

Thank you all.

Can I ask for any thoughts re files disappearing from nas? They didn’t just go from media server but from the nas itself?

mike27oct wrote:

Pearl, don’t ISO files served by MyMedia need to be processed by a program on the PC for them to work on a WDTV?  If so, then using network shares on the WD might be better because the WD does the decoding of the raw ISO file, right?

 

edit:  message above came in while I was writing this one, and it seems I was on the same track as Mr Wolf.

 

Keep playing of ISOs simple, and use network shares.

Yes and no. On some media servers (PO inlcluded), you can explicity tell the application which file types the client understands  and it does not transcode them, just sends them native. On something like a Roku which only understandsa few containers, (Mp4 and ?), you have to transcode most stuff. For the SMP, you can send a lot of video types direct if you choose. Still, not really a good reason to do this with a SMP or a HUB. Now, if you had another streaming media player that was not really built for local media, DLNA could really help you out.

Im sure someone here has good reasons to use DLNA instead of networks share to get to their local files on an SMP, I am just not sure what they are. 

-P

Markhad wrote:
Thank you all.

Can I ask for any thoughts re files disappearing from nas? They didn’t just go from media server but from the nas itself?

What indicates they are truly gone – ignore the WD for a moment – can you not see them from your computer?

Correct, looking at drive on pc in explorer.

You were copying all the files that disapeared, when you lost connection the the NAS?

Are you sure the files were copied to the NAS?

Is the NAS reliable? You use it for long time without problems? Is NAS firmware updated?

Is WDTV firmware updated?

PS:

If you are not going to use DLNA, make sure you disable it in your NAS.

NAS has a limited cpu, if you turn off everything that you don’t use, you will free cpu to the main fuction: read/write file speed.

No, I copied the files to the NAS and they were there fine.  There was a blip when copying (See my initial post) but that was a cuople of days ago.  All files were seen by WD TV and was happily watching them.

I was watching the film that has the blip when copying but all seemed fine.  Switched it off half way through wathcing it.  When I webnt back a few hours later, the film I was watching was still there, but most (not all) of the others has disappeared form the NAS.  Checked via PC and could see they were definitely missing.  During that time nothng else was done to the NAS drive.

Both NAS and WD TV both brand new.  PC new runnign W8.1. 

I don’t think it’s possible to know why the files disapeared, but if I tried to guess…

Some things that can make files disapear (I’m not saying it was (or was not) your case):

  1. Bugs in firmware, please update WDTV and NAS firmware

  2. Having write access to the files, maybe you should give WDTV only read access to you shares

  3. People delete files, NAS files can be deleted from wdtv, from the NAS and from your computer.

  4. Files were corrupt and a chkdsk like event was manual runed or scheduled from the NAS, deleting the corrupted files.

Well, I think any of those (bar 3) are plausible. I will update firmware. My guess is that although windiws resumed copying the files, it became somewhat corrupted and something deleted them.

I’ve re copied them and all is good so far.