Looking for DLNA media Server

[Yanta]

Hi,

I've been trying many DLNA servers over the last 3 months. Can't seem to find one that works.

I'm running Windows 2008 R2 for my server. Have 3470 CPU, 8GB 2133 RAM, AsRock Fatality Professional with 2 NICS Teamed and running LBFO. The network is all Gigabit wired. No wireless. Switches are Gigabit, and I have 2 Samsung TVs, an LG TV, 2 PS3s. The TVs are between 12 months and 3 years old. All are running latest firmware.

I've tried

Serviio - Audio out of sync, can't get it to work - The support forum is quite unresponsive.
Mezzmo - Constantly crashes, loses folders and more
XBMC - Cannot find any renderers no matter what I do
AllmediaServer - Most stuff in a foreign language
Plex - Doesn't support the formats my media is in (almost entirely MKV), according to http://www.topnettricks.com/plex-media-server-review/
Universal Media Server - Cant remember what was wrong with this - it was the first one I tried months ago.
TVersity - seems to be a dead product not updated in 4 years.

And some other more obscure servers.

Would really like to get one working, so I can free up a PC being used with Potplayer and nothing else.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

thanks
Tanya

[manono]

Plex - Doesn't support the formats my media is in (almost entirely MKV), according to http://www.topnettricks.com/plex-media-server-review/

Have you tried? Probably 95% of what I play through Plex are MKVs with x264 video and either AAC or AC3 audio.

[betwixt]

Serviio has always worked best for me. I'm not sure how you get a sync problem unless you are transcoding 'on the fly' because the wrong profile is selected.
Your other option is to download a 'live' linux distribution, one dedicated to being a media server rather than a general purpose OS, and run it from CD. You don't have to install it, just boot from the CD, and it will be able to read your existing media collection. - just a thought.

Brian.

[Yanta]

EDIT: I boo-boo'd UMS is the one that can't find the renderer (TV). XBMC was wrong product for the purpose.

@manono. Yes. Didn't work. I'm going to reinstall Plex and try again. It was a few months ago when I last tried it.

@betwixt. Perhaps I am transcoding on the fly? Either way ALL of my files are about 0.5 seconds out. The profile I am using IIRC, was the correct one for my TV, which is an LG 50LA6230-TB. I also remember the same thing happening on the Samsungs, using the relelvant profiles for them, but 80% of the usage is on the LG.

Also, My media took many years of ripping from my media. I now have ~ 20TB of files ripped using various tools like handbrake, DVDFab, MakeMKV and so on, but all MKVs. Since many different tools were used, the "formats" of the MKV may be different. I will try some files from different years and see if I can narrow down which files are the problematic ones.

Thanks for your replies.

[Yanta]

Well, installed Plex and it's definitely not what I am looking for. Like Mezzmo, it catalogs, and repeatedly recatalogs all media.

I have 6 drives (Movies, TV Shows, 3D Movies, Cancelled TV, Basketball, Documentaries). That's not counting the Music and Photos drives which I'm not insterested in streaming.

Because there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, I had to use symbolic links (mklink /d) to create links to drives. Each of the drives has symbolic links to each of the other drives.

What Plex and Mezzmo appear to do, is follow each link repeatedly. So in movies it will scan documentaries, and in documentaries it will scan movies. Potentially I think thats and endless loop. Millions of each media file in the library.

I say "appear to do" is because I am not 100% certain this is what is happening. I stopped the Plex update at ~43,000 entries. Mezzmo on the other hand just crashes.

Serviio for some reason doesn't appear to suffer this problem. In fact, it actually doesn't catalog everything. For example, my Castle TV episodes only list seasons 1, 4, 5, and 6, but shown as two different TV Series' (One has season 1 and the other 4 - 6).

Plex was more about the presentation at the server of the media, which I could care less about. Serviio shows me at the console only the sort of stuff I want to see. I don't want to watch the media at the server. I want to watch it on my TV.

The LG TV just couldn't see the plex server at all.

Also, plex caused my LG HR558-D BDP to crash and power off every time I tried to access it.

So' I'm still looking.

[Cauptain]

Using Serviio, UMS or Plex on my Tvs (2 LGs and 2 Panasonics), PS3, X360, XONE,WD TV, Chromecast and Smartphones all files play perfectly. Wireless and wireless to Wired (3 WR4300 dualband TP-links).

The only problem: If any MKV or MP4 file have Reference frame > 3 and Profile > 4.1. Its need transcoding to play.

Serviio is easy to config and have full access remote play. Its my first choice.

[aazerty]

Hi ,

Do you know "PS3 Media Server" ?
http://ps3mediaserver.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3507

Cheers .

[Yanta]

The only problem: If any MKV or MP4 file have Reference frame > 3 and Profile > 4.1. Its need transcoding to play.

Serviio is easy to config and have full access remote play. Its my first choice.

Serviio was one of my early choices. I found that despite having HDMI 1.4 and equipment that all supported ARC, that the only way to get audio out Serviio was to plug in an optical cable. Having solved that I went back to Serviio and found that ALL (without exception), files have the audio about 0.5 - 1.0 seconds out of sync.

It has been suggested that transcoding might be what is causing the audio sync issue. I haven't reinstalled it yet to test.

So, I guess my next test is to reinstall Serviio and turn off transcoding and see how many of my MKVs won't play due to the reasons you stated above.

I took a random sample of files and they vary in profile and ReFrames. Which makes sense. I've been ripping my DVDs/Blu-rays to MKV for years. But the combination of 3/4.1 does exist. Most of my recent stuff uses a profile of 4.1.

[HarpMaster]

I've been using an aussie DLNA media server for my Samsung tv, which I've found easy to use and
very satisfactory. They have a free edition which is good enough for most purposes. It takes a while
to catalogue all your media, but after that, I'm very happy with it.

http://www.kooraroo.com/?rsn=hm


For LG Smart tv's and Blu-rays Nero has a pretty good free DLNA media server, which would work on
on other machines too, I'd think.

[Cornucopia]

My LG TV specifically REQUIRES Plex as the DLNA server (and works fine with it). No problems with sync. But I only rip, not convert, so it's usually already compliant and needs no transcoding. I believe that (transcoding) is part of your problem.

The thing with the symbolic links: WHY are you using them? Just have your client app include each of the drives in their folder watch list, and REMOVE the symbolic links BETWEEN the drives. Not necessary. Yes, you'll have a slightly longer navigation time to the pertinent folder, but I'd bet that would clear up your problem.

Scott

[lordsmurf]

I've used Serviio for about 3 years now.
Use it for Samsung Blu-ray players, as well as WDTV.

[scottfree1]

Went through the same thing, ended up consolidating my media and pulling one of my drives and putting into external usb/esata enclosure esata to move big files to the drive fast, and usb to connect to? Well I'm cheap so I added a second router as a media server, a NetGear WNR3500Lv2 ($35 amz referb & $15 for the enc). Flashed tomatousb which has minidnla built in, it handles it without breaking a sweat. It's not perfect but it's better than servio, wild media, allshare, koorora, PLEX, ushare, mediatomb and.. and.. etc..

You gotta find the sweet spot though which I found @ mpeg2/ac3/mkv or..

"ffmpeg.exe" -y -itsoffset 0 -threads 8 -i "video.MP4" -vcodec mpeg2video -b:v 2000000 -r 23.976 -f matroska -map 0:0 -map 0:1 -acodec ac3 -ab 128k -af aresample=resampler=soxr -ar 44100 -ac 2 video.mkv"

Use Media Center Master (free) it grabs metadate/thumbs off imdb almost automatically..

This will get you thumbs for vids & folders and and a xmbc nfo hold the metadata

Video.mkv
Video.jpg
Video.nfo
folder.jpg

(thumbs metadata are device dependent, above works perfect with my dish hopper, but only gets thumbs on my samsung bd-c5500 b-ray)

Name BMEDIA
Model Netgear WNR3500L v2
Chipset Broadcom BCM5357 chip rev 2 pkg 10
CPU Freq 480MHz
Flash Size 128MB
While streaming..
CPU Load (1 / 5 / 15 mins) 0.68 / 0.18 / 0.06
Total / Free Memory 123.77 MB / 100.44 MB (81.15%)

[scottfree1]

One last trick fat32 will give you 3x faster transfers vs ntfs..