Unable to play some HD mkv's via Twonky

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Hub Discussions
1

What I’m trying to do:

Play media stored on my WDTV Live Hub via DLNA, *to* a Windows 7 PC with WMP12.

The Hub shows up in WMP12 under “Other Libraries”, and I can view/access the video’s available on the Hub. Some HD movies encoded in mkv can play via DLNA, others can’t. WMP gives a “…cannot play the file…” message. I’m trying to figure out what it is. It almost seems like a file size issue, as if anything over 4GB won’t play.

All files play just fine on the Hub to the TV, and all files play just fine directly on the PC using WMP12.

Here are some examples of what will and won’t play via DLNA from the Hub.

Plays fine:

size: 1.86GB

video codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC

Res: 1280x544

frame rate: 23.97

audio codec: AC3

bitrate: 384kbs

Does NOT play fine:

size: 4.4GB

video codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC

res: 1280x720

frame rate: 23.97

audio codec: DTS

bitrate: 768kbs

Plays fine:

size: 600MB

video codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC

res: 720x496

frame rate:29.97

audio codec: AC3

bitrate: 160kbs

Does NOT play fine:

size: 12.9GB

video codec: H264 - MPEG4 AVC

res:1920x816

frame rate: 23.97

audio codec: DTS

bitrate 1536kbs

Any ideas?

2

Probably the DTS audio.

3

Yeah. Right after I posted, I noticed the common factor. I did some more googling this morning, and it seems that Twonky server doesn’t fully support DTS as one of its audio formats.

4

TWONKY doesn’t care.   Twonky just streams the file as-is.   It’s up to the player to decode it.

I think it’s more likely that WMP12 doesn’t work with DTS when using DLNA.

5

Might be relevent, but I believe twonkey does not support MKV direct to DNLA devices, as Tony says, twonkey is just a streamer, the player must decode it.

6

Twonky does support MKV direct to DLNA devices.   In fact, since it’s a DLNA server, it ONLY supports media direct to DLNA devices.  :)

7

Then can anyone point me to a decent DLNA software client for Windows7 x64 that I can continue testing with? (I’m actually testing DLNA across my wireless network to see what I can and can’t accomplish.)