.MP4 files DLNA with Twonky 5.1.9 on WDTV Live Hub Extremely Slow hence useless to me

[mftolan]

I've spent hours, days, and weeks searching, reading, testing and trying ... even bought a brand new WDTV Live HUB compared to my year old HUB  and neither performed as I desired with regards to being a Media Server with Twonky 5.1.9 and .MP4 files

I'm pretty computer literate and technically competent, but this is killing me ... I beleive it's how twonky 5.1.9 is handling the files and trying to stream them, but this is not an area of my expertise.

Here's what I have, WDTV Live HUB, about 500 .MP4 files (full length movie files .8 Gb to 1.4 Gb in size) which I used handbrake to convert. The files stream and play fine on both my Samsung TV's (LCD xxxxxxxC650 and xxxxxxxC550) using a netbook computer runnning Windows 7 as a Media Server, they also stream play fine from my new Netgear 6300 router with ReadyShare connected via the USB port. My entire network is hardwired with CAT5e and/or CAT6 completely Gigabit.

Trying to use my WDTV Live Hub, my Samung TV's fail, after a long time of loading message, preparing to play message, but then display file format not supported error these are the exact files I streamed and played on the netbook w/ Win 7 and Netgear 6300 router. I then connected to the Twonky Media interface using 192.168.1.xx:9000 to get to the UI on a Windows XP computer, I was able to see the media and go to the folder and file where my .MP4 files were recognized by Twonky, I clicked on one and waited about a minute or so before the file actually started to play ... It appeared to me it was doing a huge amount of buffering or something, I could see my LAN status was receiving a huge amount of data ... I suspect that is what is happening with my Samsung TV's (they both behave the same way) ... Is twonky trying to buffer way to much or something that causes the TV to basically time-out and giving the error message "file format not supported"

I really would prefer not to run the Media server on the netbook as it tends to be a bit slow and with my new Netgear 6300 router seeming to be a great Media Server but not what I want to use it as ... Now that I know the files work from other Media Servers with DLNA, and I believe .MP4 is one of the most universally accepted file format, I could do .mkv, but if I recall that didn't work either, or possibly some other formats, but hate to think how many weeks it would take to re-encode near 500 movie to a different format ...

To add to the confusion, some smaller .MP4 files seem to play fine ... and I have some home videos I converted with I think Arch soft or something .mpg files which are very large 3 to 4 Gb, but play fine ...

I wish I could upgrade my Twnoky version on my WD TV Live Hub ... My gut feeling tells me that would probablt fix it, but I'm no expert in video converting file formats and why some work and other dont ...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Mike

[TonyPh12345]

There are PLENTY of complaints about the compatibility of Samsung with Twonky 5.1.9.   I would about bet that's the root of your issues...  and it's not just MP4 files, it's all kinds of issues.

WD prefers to blame the way that Samsung does DLNA (some non-"standard" request formats and such) but Twonky later editted special profiles in later server versions that corrects that.   So I do think that it's largely a Samsung thing.  Not likely to be fixable with respect to the Hub since you can't upgrade Twonky on it.

The WDTV SMPs, for example, have no problems receiving MP4s from Twonky on a Hub...

Twonky doesn't "buffer" anything.   It's the RECEIVING device that controls how much buffering is done...  

So it could just be that your media player needs to buffer quite a bit of MP4 in order to get to the "Table of Contents" or "Metadata" or something before it starts playback.   It's hard to tell without looking at a Wireshark capture or something like that to look under the hood...

[mftolan]

Thanks for the response, certainly corfirms I finally understood a bit more where it seems the root issue is ... Doesn't really fix it but sometimes that happens ...

My thoughts right now are how impossible is it to upgrade Twonky on a  Live Hub. It seems WD will not be upgrading Twonky and I can imagine why ...

Thanks

Mike