Sun Sep 11, 2011 4:04 pm
Serviio doing what others cannot do
Just thought I would throw in my 2 pence worth to this.
A couple of years back I got a Sony KDL-32V5810 LCD TV, while I am more than happy with the picture quality and other features of this unit, the dlna streaming was to be honest utterly shocking. Pretty much the only thing it would steam from was WMP, which in turn was never happy as all my content is hosted on a server in the house, on the rare occasion it would play something you could lay pretty good odds it would just "freeze" a few minutes in to what you were watching. I was also a little irked at having to have the windows PC running as well as the server to attempt to view something, while the alternative was to have the 360 running as it would at least take content from the server all be it with support pretty much only for avi formatted stuff.
It seemed to be the sticking point for most of this was the fact the TV only supports an mpeg2 stream, so the need to transcode content on the fly was a key requirement, I searched, spoke at great length on mailing lists but in the end gave up as nothing really fitted the bill.
Then on someone told me about serviio on Friday, so on I checked out the freeBSD ports tree and sure enough serviio was there, compiling was painless aside from the manual java downloads, but that is out with the creators control, the config was a bit more challenging a couple of things were not glaringly obvious at least to me, but after a little help from the forums I can now report all is well.
I let it build its library overnight, so I finally managed to test it out today and I have to say the results are very good.
AVI (divx / xvid) to the Sony TV work fine, but more what amazed me more was the .mkv playback not only does it work and play smoothly but the quality is very high, the comparison to WMP transcoding such media .. well I say comparison there is no comparison really as WMP makes the resultant file look like a highly compressed webcam stream, that is blocky jerky and generally a waste of time and effort, serviio clear smooth and I would say pretty much near HD as you can get.
So overall you have yet another impressed user, my thanks to all who have developed this software.
A couple of years back I got a Sony KDL-32V5810 LCD TV, while I am more than happy with the picture quality and other features of this unit, the dlna streaming was to be honest utterly shocking. Pretty much the only thing it would steam from was WMP, which in turn was never happy as all my content is hosted on a server in the house, on the rare occasion it would play something you could lay pretty good odds it would just "freeze" a few minutes in to what you were watching. I was also a little irked at having to have the windows PC running as well as the server to attempt to view something, while the alternative was to have the 360 running as it would at least take content from the server all be it with support pretty much only for avi formatted stuff.
It seemed to be the sticking point for most of this was the fact the TV only supports an mpeg2 stream, so the need to transcode content on the fly was a key requirement, I searched, spoke at great length on mailing lists but in the end gave up as nothing really fitted the bill.
Then on someone told me about serviio on Friday, so on I checked out the freeBSD ports tree and sure enough serviio was there, compiling was painless aside from the manual java downloads, but that is out with the creators control, the config was a bit more challenging a couple of things were not glaringly obvious at least to me, but after a little help from the forums I can now report all is well.
I let it build its library overnight, so I finally managed to test it out today and I have to say the results are very good.
AVI (divx / xvid) to the Sony TV work fine, but more what amazed me more was the .mkv playback not only does it work and play smoothly but the quality is very high, the comparison to WMP transcoding such media .. well I say comparison there is no comparison really as WMP makes the resultant file look like a highly compressed webcam stream, that is blocky jerky and generally a waste of time and effort, serviio clear smooth and I would say pretty much near HD as you can get.
So overall you have yet another impressed user, my thanks to all who have developed this software.