First, I admit that I leaped into the WD Hub world before I educated myself well enough… Current setup is 3 Hubs plus a 2TB MyBook Live, all hard wired on a gigabit network.
What I want to do is set up a way to centralize access to all content. By this I mean, press the Videos radio button and have all videos on all 4 devices combined into one list. As I know, the Hub as designed won’t do that. In essence, I want it to behave somewhat like my Whole Home DirecTV DVRs - content from all DVRs show up on one playlist.
If I set up a PC running Twonky (or some other media sharing software) it is possible for that PC to combine all 4 souces into one share/one set of folders? If so, how much horsepower would that PC need? I have an old Dell laptop with a P4 CPU (don’t remember CPU speed) and a 100MB ethernet port - is that enough to stream HD M2Ts files and blu ray ISOs from the connected Hubs and NAS?
Thanks.
Yes, that IS possible. As long as the PC’s twonky instance can have access to the SHARES of all of the other devices in order to index and stream it, then it should work exactly as described.
Twonky doesn’t require much horsepower as long as it’s not TRANSCODING.
A 100MB ethernet port ought to serve out 3 or 4 SD streams without breaking a sweat. HD streams, probably only one, MAYBE two, depending on the bitrate of the files involved.
The HUBs may be the weak link here. Since the SAMBA performance on the Hubs is pretty low, you might only be able to get two or three SD streams or 1 HD stream out of a Hub.
(You would be accessing the Hub via SAMBA since TWONKY on the PC is going to access the Hubs though the Sharing protocol, not the TWONKY interface. I don’t think Twonky can stream from OTHER twonky servers, but I don’t know for sure.)
Thanks, Tony. Certainly worth a try based on your answer. It would make it much easier for my wife to use the Hubs if she did not have to change sources, remember what is on what Hub, the MyBook Live, etc. The old laptop is collecting dust, so this would be a good use for it.
I would normally only stream to one Hub at a time. Highest bit rate would be either from blu ray ISOs or from M2TS files generated at 11-13 MB/sec from OTA HD recordings.
I will post my results for others to see.
Tony: I set up the old laptop with Twonky last night and it seems to be working fine. I was able to stream an OTA HD M2TS file to one of the Hubs while Twonky was still indexing the other Hubs. No stuttering at all. Had to enable Twonky’s aggregate option consolidate the playlist.
I did order a USB to 1GB network adapter from Amazon yesterday ($26) to make sure the laptop’s 100MB connection did not get in the way.
Twonky is not finding some content - it seems that setting it up to scan only the root directory of the Hubs is not sufficient. I set up scans to sub folders this morning - hopefully that will fix it.
Again, thanks for taking the time to answer my question. You were very helpful.
Keep in mind that Twonky only supports certain file types… Even if the HUB supports the File, Twonky might not, and thus it may not appear in the listing.
That’s the problem. I made ISOs from a bunch of owned DVDs and I see that Twonky doesn’t do ISO. Looks like I need to make MKVs of them. Thanks again.
