DLNA not working as expected!

[Deepak Agarwal]

Hi Guys


I have now been able to install FreeNAS on one of my old PC's and it seems to work with a lot of help from a lot of people on this forum! So thanks a lot for that!

I now need to be able to see the media on my 'Volume' through all my other PC's on the network (haven't tested this but I believe this should be no problem as I am able to do that from one of the others anyway) and also through my mobile devices such as my phone and tablet.

I did attempt to install the DLNA plugin and it seemed to half work. In my first attempt, I was able to see the media folder on my Panasonic Viera TV - was successfully able to open still photos and also play music. At this time I didn't have any movies on this folder. At this stage, I hadn't tried to see if this folder was visible on my mobile devices.

I subsequently added a couple of .avi, mp4, .mpg, .vob and .mkv files to test if these are playable on these devices. Surprisingly, I could see the updated folder on my tablet and phone and also play most of the file formats on both - couldn't paly .mkv or .avi on the tablet though but that is another matter. I am not too worried about that.

However, I couldn't get this media folder to show up on my TV anymore no matter what I tried. I even deleted the plugin, reinstalled it and everything else that I could think of. I am at the verge of restarting from scratch with the exception of reinstalling the software on the USB drive unless there is something else that can fix this issue.

Just to let you all know, I just copied files through Windows Explorer from my local PC drive to the NAS drive.


Any assistance would be highly valued.



Best regards


Deepak

 

[heavenhated]

Hi Deepak,

Your problem description is too simple for anyone to help here. You will have to post some screen shots of all your set up. It looks like your router is able to detect the server which is good news.

Unable to see your files could be as simple as permission issue for the DLNA.

Please share screen shots of your set up to help

S.Vivek

 

[Deepak Agarwal]

Hi heavenhated


Thanks for your response but...

If you look for some of my other posts from the recent times you will find that I have been deemed to be beyond help here on this forum...!

The jig has now been dismantled and I am in no hurry to retry it out in the immediate future! I am currently trying to get my WD TV Live media player to see my shared drive on this old spare PC of mine running Windows XP SP3 (this was the PC that was then being used to work with FreeNAS, I don't have another available) - haven't succeeded yet but hopefully will get there sooner than later! If you want to PM me on that, that would be appreciated but..FreeNAS - may be its just not for me! I am just too dumb for it, perhaps!

Obviously, I am a trifle disillusioned with the FreeNAS community at this point in time - no, don't get me wrong, the product has to be good but may be its just not for me!


Genuinely appreciate your interest and hope that you might be able to stay in touch through PM's.



Best regards


Deepak

 

[heavenhated]

Deepak,

The way one starts with freenas is with an assumption and requirement that he/she would get into detail search, experimentation and basically DIY on every issues. There are situations that will need some of our forum experts to help out. The Freenas is my only server and most of us here know its limitations and its strengths.

There are issues where mods have worked with the user over skype or im to help them fix or atleast find the issue.

Issues like media not showing or plugin not showing up on the tree are pretty much discussed and fixed here.

Freenas as a community does not owe anyone anything. Its a collective forum of potential developers sharing their expertise to make it easier for users. Between 8 and 9 you will know how much has gone into development. The plugins installation part is now so easy that you should ask old timers on the way they would download pbi files and perform n number of steps to install. The gui based installation is a development out of this forum.

In case of your issue, share it over PM. You had everything working but you were impatient to test out few things to get the server load with files. its not difficult. I too have a strange issue and i know its not because of freenas but more so because my inability to udnerstand networking.

I still have asked some help from here who may have faced the network issue

S.Vivek

 

[Deepak Agarwal]

Hi S.Vivek


I have given it a second thought after your messasge and I decided to persevere with it! I have now freed up my jig for FreeNAS. I installed FreeNAS on a USB stick and booted it off it and it all good! I created the volume on a test small 80GB HDD and also created a Windows CIFA share and it was working all good! I can see the share on all my devices including mobile phones, tablet, laptops, desktops, WD TV Live media player everything!

I now wanted to use a 2 TB hard drive as my final storage drive - which I just bought. I shutdown the system, replaced the test one with this new one and rebooted the system off the USB stick - started ok! When I was trying to recreate the volume, FreeNAS only sees the 2 TB drive as 1 TB HDD - what happened to the other 1 TB space? Is it seeing the as a 1 TB Raid configuration by default? Is there a way to change it? Or you can just point me to some reference document that I can go to.


Any assistance would be highly valued.


P.S. Please ignore this - as I rebooted and this time it is showing as a 2 Tb drive - so that is ok! I am happy that I haven't lost a TB of disk space!



Best regards


Deepak