Media Server Problems

[Accessless]

First off I would like to point out that I'm not good with networking.

OK, so I recently decided to connect an old USB hard drive to my router to store films on. The PCs have no problem accessing the files from the network drive, however the DVD player would only work if I set up a media server. The problem that I'm encountering is that only one file is appearing on the media server. I originally thought that the file types were the problem but converting a video to the same format as the one working video made no difference. So now I'm confused.

Any helpful suggestions or theories?

Router is a TP-Link Archer C7

[DaveLembke]

Is this one file that is seen by the DVD player located at the root of the drive, lowest level such as if the drive was Z: the file would be within the root of that drive at say Z:\video.avi whereas videos that are not found by the DVD player are located in directory trees where the DVD player may not have the ability to navigate depth to access these at say Z:\videos\christmas2014.avi

If this is the case, then you can locate all videos at the root of the drive.

Also I have heard of some players getting choked up on file size where say a 100MB file will play fine, but a 4GB file will not play, and this is because the player reads in the video to local memory before playing because it can not buffer on the fly the data, so if a video exceeds the internal memory of the player then it doesnt matter what format the video is, its clearly too large to be played.

If this were the case then you would want to use a software package such as Wild Media Server to share videos from computer to the player which would stream and buffer the data between the player and the computer.  Someone here pointed me to this program when i was having troubles and it works really well. http://www.wildmediaserver.com/

[Accessless]

There has been a development actually, It turns out that I have to refresh the router every time a new file is added. I've still had no luck with other file types other than .avi, and my conversion attempt did not work out well. It's not just the DVD player, if accessed via windows media player the PC's also only show .avi's

So I think that the problem is limited to compatible file types, but what are they? The manual was unhelpful.

Also does anyone know a good way of finding out how a video was encoded? Not that I know what the DVD player supports lol.


Good suggestion on the software approach but this requires a PC set up to do the job and I'm not desperate for this to work I'm just attempting to take advantage of all my router's features.

[strollin]

Check the manual for your router: http://www.tp-link.com/resources/document/Archer_C7_V3_UG.pdf, section 4.10 USB Settings, pg 74.  It explains how to setup the USB with folder sharing (All or selected) and also how to enable Media Sharing.

If you are using Windows Media Player, you may need to download codecs in order to play other media types.  Many people use VLC instead as it already has codecs for about any media type there is.

I have no idea what media types your DVD player supports.

[Accessless]

Ok as it turns out the problem was with an unconventional DLNA protocol which TP-link were using in the original firmware that my router was shipped with. All sorted though after a firmaware update. The particular feature was mentioned in the update brief but I had no idea what DLNA meant so I didn't realise that it would be helpful.

So if you encounter media server problems from your router, be sure to check with your manufacturer for updates relating to DLNA protocols.

[DaveLembke]

So if you encounter media server problems from your router, be sure to check with your manufacturer for updates relating to DLNA protocols.

Good to know... Thanks for sharing that in case others have same issue. Glad you got your issue worked out as well.