My player cannot play most of my videos

[avpez]

I have a sony bdp-s580 and it will play my older mpeg movies shot with an older Olympus camera but not the newer ones shot with my casio or nikon cameras. Sony suggests that they may not support the compression used to record them.

Can I configure remixing ot transforming in readydlna on my readyNAS products to work around this incompatibility? If yes how do I do it?

[HERBIEO]

I would suggest you reencode them to a format that the sony supports it will probably be far more efficient,
and less load on your nas.
what formats does the sony support and what formats are the casio or nikon movies in ?.

[avpez]

True but that would be alot of work - time spent babysitting a computer to re-encode hundreds of short videos. The way I look at it, the sony bdp is only worth $130 and I could find something else that would play those videos. In the meantime, I would like to take advantage of my nas to solve the problem while I build out my home theater. If it drags down the nas then I am forced to find another solution, but for now the nas is underutilized. I am also using the opportunity to explore the capabilities of the nas to better understand what I can do with it.

[HERBIEO]

I am not sure if the readydlna can transcode while streaming if it can i would think it would do it automaticly

[b00st3d]

save yourself the trouble...just get a WD TV Live box...they are about $75-80 and they have played every weird format i have thrown at it from my NAS.

[avpez]

I like your thinking. I was thinking that I would try loading xmbc on my appletv and see if that works better than the sony. If I wasn't intrigued by hacking into my applet, I would have probably bought the wd by now! Another product I was considering was the boxee - anyone have any experience with this product?

[StephenB]

save yourself the trouble...just get a WD TV Live box...they are about $75-80 and they have played every weird format i have thrown at it from my NAS.

It does play a lot of stuff, and it also will read the files directly (not depending on DLNA). So if you have a lot of media files, it is a reasonable option. I haven't tried the boxee.

What cameras models do you have?

A lot of digital cameras do some very strange things in their video files - oddball audio sample rates for instance. A Nikon CoolPix 5400 for example saves audio at 7875 samples per second. That kind of stuff can create stuttering or lipsync issues on many players. I authored a freeware media conversion tool quite some time ago which converts a wide range of video formats and which has a batch mode. I collected about 800 samples of camera video files to test it against. If you end up wanting to convert them, send me a PM and I can provide you a link.

[b00st3d]

I like your thinking. I was thinking that I would try loading xmbc on my appletv and see if that works better than the sony. If I wasn't intrigued by hacking into my applet, I would have probably bought the wd by now! Another product I was considering was the boxee - anyone have any experience with this product?

I hear the boxee is also good, I just don't have any personal experience. I love the wdtv box so much, I have 3 in my house!

[JarnoG]

You can try to run PS3 media server on your NAS, there's an old version here. The thread is quite long, but somewhere along the way it tells you how to install it and update it to a newer version. I don't know if your NAS is powerful enough to transcode in real-time though.

The other option would be a new media player. I've got a Mede8er MED500X2 and so far it has played everything I threw at it. The cheaper X2 versions of it use the same software, so they should be able to play the same. I've heard good stories about the WD TV Live boxes and Boxee's too, but I don't have any personal experience with them.

[techman05]

I think for encoding for the easiest but most expensive is to get a newer Nas Ultra that has orb to transcode. I'm not sure if transcoding goes for readydlna but that's what its there for.

Its either that or find a fast computer and get the batch encoding program for WMP9. Its free and you just have to tag the media and let it run. [s]Don't ask me where it is but it existed and it did me encoding easy [/s].
*Apparently found the program. Its old so it may not work too well with Windows 7 but its page still exists http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... oding.aspx

Good luck for now

[avpez]

Thanks for the great suggestions. Swamped at work right now, but when I get some time I will try some of them out.

One comment though - I thought that the Pro was faster than the Ultra? I certainly thought that the pro had enough horses for transcoding, and I kinda expected that Ready DLNA would have the capability to do it. Am I mistaken on any of the above?

[StephenB]

The pro is faster than the ultra. But AFAIK ReadyDLNA does not transcode.

[techman05]

The pro is faster than the ultra. But AFAIK ReadyDLNA does not transcode.

O.k but does it have any connections to the orb add-on that is supposed to allow transcoding on the ultras. If it readydlna doesn't on newer models its a good thing I didn't buy it yet as that's what my intention was to some extent.

Would though be nice if there was an addon on the future version for re-encoding or transcoding for media to other add-ons

[StephenB]

I haven't installed orb. From what I've read here, most people who want to transcode on the ultra or pro have switched to plex.