Movie list, Thumbnails and others

Hi. First of all, I would like to say thanks for the great job you are doing with the Serviio server. I have recently acquired a DLNA-capable device and have been trying multiple options. I am using Ubuntu, and had tried a few options before coming across your product. After that, I stopped looking - it does all I need and more. Everything just works fine for me out of the box: all my music, all movies that I tried, subtitles, ffw / rew... Great stuff.

I have a few observations / questions:

1. Thumbnails - they look not that good on my TV - they are pretty much 'colorful squares' instead of standard movie icons. They are also incorrectly scaled. This happens for all the movies I have. Is there a way to fix that? I guess not, it is probably my devices that don't show it correctly, but maybe there is something I could do. (The colorful-squares are much better than standard icons anyways)
As a side question - where do you take the images from? They seem not to be movie stills, but rather movie covers or sth - at least for mkv and mpeg files. I can see it when I get closer to the TV and attempt to decode what the pictures show.

2. I changed the menu under the Video category - I show only 'Movies' and 'Folders'. They behave differently, to the extent that 'Movies' doesn't show all movies that I have in the folder. The structure is similar to the following:
/home/wujek/Movies
- movie1.mkv
- movie2.avi
- movie3.mpeg
subfolder
- movie4.mkv
- movie5.mkv
In the 'Movie' view only the top-level (movie1, 2, and 3) movies are listed. Under folders, I can browse all folder and thusly choose any movie I have. The 'Movies' view seems not to be able to work with subfolders. Is this the case?

3. I actually have two DLNA devices, a TV and a BD player. They are by the same company, have the latest firmware, and there are some minor differences how they behave:
- the TV doesn't support searching, I don't have the subtitles menu to turn them on / off - they just get included by default if the filename is right; the BD player supports searching and subtitles menu
- in the BD player, when I enter the menu where I choose what category I want to view (music, movie, images) - this is the menu of the device - and I choose the category, say, movies - I can browse and watch, but the with my back button I cannot go back to the initial menu; on my TV this works fine (this can be worked around by simply choosing 'exit' on the remote); the categories and menus have slightly different behaviour - I guess this depends on the device, not how Serviio serves the folders, is it?

The devices in question are Samsung UE46-C7700 (TV) and HT-C6800 (BD).

Regards,
wujek

PS One thing that would make Serviio a killer for me would be to be able to watch Sopcast streams. I noticed that you plan to add some streaming support in version 0.6, but on the other hand, I also found viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1049, where you say it is not and not planned to be supported. Have you changed your mind, or is the new 0.6 streaming feature something completely different? +1 for me that Sopcast would be an awesome addition.

[zip]

1. Thumbnails - they look not that good on my TV - they are pretty much 'colorful squares' instead of standard movie icons. They are also incorrectly scaled. This happens for all the movies I have. Is there a way to fix that? I guess not, it is probably my devices that don't show it correctly, but maybe there is something I could do. (The colorful-squares are much better than standard icons anyways)

The resolution is given by DLNA spec. Samsung C series devices stretch them, on my B series the aspect ration is correct.

As a side question - where do you take the images from? They seem not to be movie stills, but rather movie covers or sth - at least for mkv and mpeg files. I can see it when I get closer to the TV and attempt to decode what the pictures show.

Covers are retrieved from online sources: http://www.serviio.org/index.php?option ... icle&id=12

In the 'Movie' view only the top-level (movie1, 2, and 3) movies are listed. Under folders, I can browse all folder and thusly choose any movie I have. The 'Movies' view seems not to be able to work with subfolders. Is this the case?

under Movies, Serviio only shows items it thinks are movies, ie items it found movie metadata for. Under Folders it shows everything (e.g. incl our home movies, music videos, etc)

- in the BD player, when I enter the menu where I choose what category I want to view (music, movie, images) - this is the menu of the device - and I choose the category, say, movies - I can browse and watch, but the with my back button I cannot go back to the initial menu; on my TV this works fine (this can be worked around by simply choosing 'exit' on the remote); the categories and menus have slightly different behaviour - I guess this depends on the device, not how Serviio serves the folders, is it?

That seems to be a problem with some of the Samsung players. 0.5.2 added further integration that some of the players don't play nicely with. Check the firmware is really the latest one. You could fix it by removing DeviceDescription from the C series profile, but then you lose the extended Samsung integration (subtitles menu, resume, etc)

under Movies, Serviio only shows items it thinks are movies, ie items it found movie metadata for. Under Folders it shows everything (e.g. incl our home movies, music videos, etc)

The movies that don't get shown are avis in my case. The thumbnails are shown for them under the 'Folders' view, it seems as though they are movie stills. I have a movie that is cut in 3 different files, and the names are simply part1.avi, part2.avi and part3.avi, under a folder name that is the actual movie title (more or less). All the movie files have correct pictures shown - how is this handled?

So, Serviio correctly guesses they are movies (following the metadata criteria), but they don't get shown in the 'Movies' view. I think I don't understand this.

That seems to be a problem with some of the Samsung players. 0.5.2 added further integration that some of the players don't play nicely with. Check the firmware is really the latest one. You could fix it by removing DeviceDescription from the C series profile, but then you lose the extended Samsung integration (subtitles menu, resume, etc)

Yes, it is the very latest firmware, I am sure of that. I don't want to loose all the nice features, and it's not a big deal for me. Just wanted to make sure that you are aware of these tiny glitches.

When you talk about 'resume', what do you mean? How does one use it?

[zip]

All the movie files have correct pictures shown - how is this handled?

Do they have a picture of DVD cover or just a scene from the movie?

When you talk about 'resume', what do you mean? How does one use it?

You should be able to get back to your latest viewed position once you stop a movie and play it again (probably via the blue D button)

All the movie files have correct pictures shown - how is this handled?

Do they have a picture of DVD cover or just a scene from the movie?

They have a still of a movie scene. Does the Samsung device do it, or Serviio? I read the link you gave me about metadata extraction and it doesn't mention Serviio doing this itself?

As for 'resume' - does it survive device / Serviio being turned off, or other movies played between the stop / resume?

[zip]

All the movie files have correct pictures shown - how is this handled?

Do they have a picture of DVD cover or just a scene from the movie?

They have a still of a movie scene. Does the Samsung device do it, or Serviio? I read the link you gave me about metadata extraction and it doesn't mention Serviio doing this itself?

Scene means the metadata has not been found. Serviio does it, as is stated on the link I gave you (Embedded metadata).

As for 'resume' - does it survive device / Serviio being turned off,?

Yes

Ok, I didn't know avi can have some other metadata, only sound and video, and you can extract it. Cool.
Ok, thanks for your help and answers.

[zip]

Ok, I didn't know avi can have some other metadata, only sound and video, and you can extract it. Cool.

We just take a snapshot of a frame from the video, it's not really metadata.

Ok, so it is not my TV / BD that produces the images / frames from the AVIs, it's Servioo, more exactly an 'extractor'.
So that means Servioo discovered that the files are movies / films in the first place, to attempt the extraction.
So we can go back to the very first post, question #2: why are such movies not included in the 'Movies' view?
Regards.

[zip]

No, it knows it's a video file, it doesn't know it's a movie (could be series episode, home video, music video, trailer, sample, etc). If there is metadata on TheMovieDB.org for the file name then it's considered to be a movie.

Ah, that's why. Now I get it - for me, a 'movie' is anything that has a movie-like extension, and Serviio differentiates.
Thanks for your answers.

How about my PS from the first post? About internet content streaming and Sopcast? Is it going to be supported?

[zip]

How about my PS from the first post? About internet content streaming and Sopcast? Is it going to be supported?

I doubt it, they seem to have their own protocol. Unless Desktop streaming is implemented.

What exactly is this 'Desktop streaming'? I know this term only in connection with VLC (a popular player that you most likely know well).
As long as Sopcast is concerned, I used it the following way: there is this sp-sc-auth command line application that takes a sop:// url and a local port and creates a 'server' bound to that port. Then, with VLC, I can go to Media -> Open Network Stream, choose http://localhost: and can watch the stream. This has been the only way I could find to play sopcast under Linux.
On the other hand, VLC also supports streaming, i.e. I can create a stream. It's very easy to stream a local file to some port on my machine, so that others can watch it. I can also stream another stream (I know, I know) to another port on my computer; this stream that I 'forward' could be the sop:// url that sp-sc-auth exposes as a local stream. (I just did it with one of my movies: I created a stream on port 1111, then streamed the stream - forwarded it - from 1111 to 2222 with another instance of VLC, and then connected yet another instance of VLC to http://localhost:2222 and I saw the movie.
Do you think this could work somehow with the new Serviio 0.6? What streaming protocol / support are you going to implement? Because I think that if I could create a local stream which is compatible with what 0.6 will support, it could actually be possible to have Sopcast more or less supported? VLC streaming supports transcoding, remuxing and so on, so I guess I could do it using VLC, and Serviio could 'forward' it to the DLNA device without transcoding itself (as long as VLC produces a DLNA-compliant output, that is, but I could use the generic profile to make sure).
VLC can create HTTP, MMS, UDP, RTP and IceCast streams, whatever these are ;d
Am I making any sense here?

[zip]

That might work. Lets see