Video Playlist Lag Question

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

ill start with my setup

Drbo 5N connected to network and (5) WDTV SMP connected to it

everything works great, i do nothing fancy i use the large grid view(think its 10 movies show per page) with thumbnail pictures only, no data movie sheets or any of that. every box is wired via Cat6 Ethernet.

so now my problem. 

my movie collection is getting large. I like my folder with all the movies in it, but i would like to keep my main folder and branch off and add Genre folders or maybe Actor folders. i know shortcuts do not work which **bleep**, so i used playlist.

both .pls and .m3u and the playlist actually load and work fine. my problem is they lag, once loaded when i am browsing through the playlist as i change the page i get liek a 10 second delay.

im just wondering if there is a way to get rid of that lag.

now i do not use Media Library. i have that turned off, honestly just dont understand it and way back when i had alot of problems found it best to keep it off. i do have an External drive i will be trying to test if Media Librarry makes my playlist lost smoother. but in the mean time i thought i would ask here and see if anyone else had any experience with this subject, any trial and error advice or maybe there is just a plain simple solution.

also i am using Playlist Creator 3.6.2 using Relative Paths.

any help is appreciated, i know there have got to be a ton of people out there in the same boat. and it could be as simple as using the media library option.

2

I have a similar setup. I keep my media files on a NAS box with a main content directory and then 5 subdirectories below that, each of which has a few hundred files. If I don’t sub-divide it like that, it is too cumbersome to page through the files and find the one you want.

I also never understood what WD Media Library was supposed to do for me so I never tried it. I am skeptical of ever trying it because my WD boxes require enough reboots as it is without using yet another memory intensive feature when I already know memory management in the WD **bleep**.

My suggestion if you have not already done so is to check out a DLNA server. Rather than pointing the WD boxes directly at a file share on your NAS, you point the DLNA server at your NAS and then point the WD boxes at the DLNA servier. It would automatically do things like index your files by genre, actor, year, etc. I have used a free one called Serviio which works very well and was easy to set up on Win7.

Using a DLNA servier as I have suggested makes my media playback dependent on one more machine, but my PC is on all the time anyway so it isn’t be that big a deal and it’s a tradeoff for the functionality. Another option: I think my NAS and even a router I bought recently have DLNA servers built into them, though I have never tried them. I assume they would provide similar functionality and would not require a PC to be running / accessible on the network.