WD MyBookWorld II (white light) NAS with Twonky - not really up to the job... What alternatives?

Slight disappointment with the WD TV Live box - it’s not as swish as I thought it would be…

Anyways… the MyBookWorld II (white light) NAS is using the Twonky Media Server - only because I don’t want  to see the network password prompt when using shared folders…

The combination struggles when showing thumbnails for photographs - this makes the browsing of albums virtually unusable. These photos are from a 10M pixel camera and produce files of a few Mbytes.

So solution 1 : get a faster NAS (expensive)

or solution 2: get a USB HDD and plug it into the Media Streamer itself (cheaper).

Having a locally attached USB HDD is so counter-intuitive - the storage should just be ‘somewhere’ on the network.

But will the performance of a locally attached USB HDD compare with (a faster) NAS performance?

Are there limitations on number of photos - will it cope with, say, 100,000 photos comfortably on a USB drive?

Thanks,

Taliska

I don’t understand why you’re having those issues.

Using *any* NAS, you can disable the Password prompt by telling it to log in automatically.   You’ll never see the prompt again unless you change UID/PW.

A faster NAS isn’t going to solve your issues.   If your photos are multi-megabytes in size, it’s got a LOT of data to move to the Live before it can display thumbs.   We’re talking 30-40 megabytes.   If all of your photos have EXIF thumbnails, the process is notably faster because only the EXIF headers are needed (depending on how you’re accessing them.)

Ok - had time to go away and figure it out some more.

I now understand how the networking logon settings are designed to work - needless to say, they weren’t what I was expecting… I took the Automatically logon option to mean logon using a password-free anonymous account - which would be undesirable with any NAS - hence why I  had the option unset. This was a result of just getting the box and just wanting to get it working as soon as possible. I guess that if it were called something along the lines of ‘automatically logon with saved credientials’, or some such, I woudn’t have been confused.

Anyway…

Twonky is the bottleneck on the WD MyBookWorld NAS - it cannot supply photo information fast enough for the thumbnails to be displayed in a reasonable time. Attaching as a shared network drive does allow the thumbnails to appear in a reasonable time.

So I wonder how it would be possible to reduce the bottleneck further - is it a limitation of the WDTVLive, the network, or the Media Source. (The MyBookWorld is not a fast NAS by any means.)

As most of the images are straight off the camera, I’d expect them to have EXIF pictures.

Locally attached USB drives (mine’s a bit old now) are quick as well - but it’s definitely creating some thumbnails on the USB drive… it doesn’t seem to do this on the shared NAS folder though. And it doesn’t appear to show thumbnails on folders on the NAS, but does on the USB… how confusing.

Any further thoughts on speed and thumbnails would be much appreciated.

Taliska

Oh this is pants,  I wasn’t that far wrong originally after re-reading the manual…

Auto Login to Network Share

Use this menu to select a login procedure. When set to On , the media player logs into the network share anonymously. When set to Off , the media player prompts you to enter the account name and password to access the network share.

All makes sense now - a combination of bad documentation and not reading the manual…