Having bought a Samsung SmartTV I want to get a DLNA server up and running on my server. I have fiddled with some like TwonkyServer and currently Mezzmo, but from someone coming from XBMC, none of them is really any good. I have almost 200 DVD's and over 1000 TV series episodes so I need something with a good library structure. None of them allows me to seperate the video files into "TvShows" and "Movies" and none of them have any decent library structure. It is just one great pile of "Video-material" which makes it tiring browsing for that one episode of Entourage you know is buried down there somewhere. What I need is a DLNA server not unlike XBMC which will allow me to index my files by type, and preferably have a built-in scraper function because the naming scheme of my video files is not exactly family friendly with all the punctuation marks and random codes.
I've been very happy with MediaTomb but I presume your running a windows server and I'm not sure if MT runs on windows. Doesn't the default windows media player have a DLNA component built in?
serviio (Windows & Linux) works well with samsungs, I had nothing but problems trying to get the DNLA function to work. Under both OS's as samsung hasn't followed the DNLA protocol properly. However no DNLA server will give you XBMC front end, you have to use the naff built in menu system of the TV as if your surfing a USB device. I will be dumping the DNLA function of my samsung and going to a XMBC raspberry Pi system as soon as their first stable release is availble. As for scrappers, under windows i used a great app called 'ember', its very powerful for film folders and allows you to build a good library for XBMC. As for TV shows i used 'therenamer'. If you aquire your TV shows like me, then the renamer helps to remove the stupid naming of the files to something more uniform and sensible. There both windows apps, not look if there are linux based versions
Yeah I know I won't be getting the XBMC front-end but a filemanagement system that allowed me to seperate the different files on the server would be a lot better than the horrible "one-long-list" syndrome most of these DLNA servers have! The problem I seem to be having is that my Samsung TV will not accept bitrates higher than 8mb/s which is rubbish since most of my blu-ray rips are a much higher bitrate. Using Mezzmo with the real time transcoding just made my server (an i3 530, 4gb ram) throw up on itself from exhaustion. I do know Ember thanks, it is for my own sake that the movies are named as such, ensures I know which ones are blu-ray rips and which ones are DVD rips. I will try and have a look at Serviio but otherwise I might go the Raspberry Pi route as you suggest, it just seems a shame as it would be nice to be able to control all of it from a single remote.
I used Serviio on my Toshiba TV and it worked well, even managing to do on the fly transcoding of everything. It will display movies, music and pictures separately but the only way I found to give some sort of real order was to pop everything in folders named accordingly then just using the folder view on my TV. I did run into some issues near the end of my use, for some reason certain MKV files just wouldn't play, my TV claimed they were corrupt but they played fine on my rig. IMO you should go the Pi route. Things are so much easier playing through HDMI then trying to get things working through the network.
Thats why it managed to transcode so well, my server doesn't handle transcoding all that well and its an i3-550.
Yeah I decided that was my best route. My rig didn't really do much at the time so having it as a DNLA/media server seemed logical. I'd go for the Pi route. It was basically designed to do just what you want
I've gone on the lookout for a used i5 or i7 socket 1156. The reasoning behind this is that the price difference between buying one of those and selling the i3 will be around the price of a Raspberry Pi, and with a lot more horsepower in the server I would be able to serve more TV's, instead of just one with a Raspberry Pi. Oh, and the e-peen factor is higher from having a powerful server Edit: Also, my issue with the current version of the Raspberry Pi is the fact that it cannot decode DTS sound on a FullHD/Full bitstream blu-ray without lagging, which is a major no-no as most of my TV's cannot decode the DTS themselves.
I like your thinking Picarro I reckon an i5 would do for a couple of standard definition streams. An i7 might cope with two HD streams at 1080p, you may encounter lag depending on how much you overclock the chip though.
my server used to have an i7-860 in it, and that was great and transcoded really well..... except my server is in quite a small M-ITX case, and that cpu nearly made everything melt. well not literally, but i figured that it wouldnt get on too well in there, so sold that and downsized to a i3-550 - considering for the most part, its just a file server/torrent box.
Then an i7 it is! Though, the i7's do not have integrated graphics right? I would need a seperate GFX for the server then.. Would a HD5450 cope with a single blu-ray stream?
More than adequate for a blu ray stream For reference, my i5 when transcoding 1080p content generally hover around 60-70% load across all cores. It will obviously depend on what it's transcoding and to what format (mine had to go to divx).
It's incredibly to watch the difference in CPU load when I transcode with my i3 530 compared to when I let my i5 2500k on my main rig do the transcoding. Whereas the 530 with two cores and two hyperthreaded cores struggle like there is no tomorrow, the i5 2500k makes mincemeat of it. It idles at 5% CPU utilized while transcoding that stream. It is incredible
i7-860 has no gpu! which is another reason why I did away with it as I needed gpu, i believe the best cpu you can get with a gpu in it would be something like the i5-660-680 you know those chips, as far as I'm aware lynefields (750, 860 etc) none of them have gpu's, you need clarkdale (i think i got those cores right, is all off teh top of my head)
Margo is completely correct, Lynnfield is the older 45nM stuff without GPU. Clarkdale is newer 32nM with a GPU. You can only get dual core Clarkdales though as far as I know. They do clock very similar to Sandy Bridge though.
they are duals with hyper threading - the i3's have high clock speeds no turbo, the i5's have high clock speeds and turbo, basically the only difference - i was going to stick a i5-6** into my server, but then I couldn't justify the cost over an i3 which I got retail for like £60 which I thought was a great deal.
