minidlna and Sony BDP-S* Blu-ray video

[falconer]

First off, many thanks to the Arch Linux ARM community; after several false starts I have my Seagate Dockstar pretty much set up, with samba, minidlna, etc. I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas about getting a variety of video formats to stream to Sony BDP-S series blu-ray player (mine is an S370, but it sounds like the S470, S570, etc, are the same in this regard).

Quick background: with the stock Pogo software, I could see the DLNA server for pictures and music, but not video, and could view jpegs but it would not recognize any audio formats I tried ("There is no playable file"). Moving to Arch Linux ARM and minidlna, I can now see the DLNA server for all media categories and can play certain formats of each. Video support over DLNA is awfully limited, however, MPEG-2 only. According to Sony's site, that is all that is officially supported via DLNA; I have verified that it will play .mp4s and such from a USB stick plugged directly in the BDP.

I found a few discussions on the Netgear ReadyNAS and minidlna Sourceforge forums about getting mvk's to run, that involve having minidlna modify file headers to fool the BDP into accepting formats it doesn't otherwise accept via DLNA. Example: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic ... 76&t=46830 (the patch discussed, applied to minidlna 1.0.18 appears to have been rolled into 1.0.19 last month).

What's confusing is that they make it work by having an mkv appear as an avi, when I can't get avi's to appear in the first place. Obviously, there is a way to stream mkv, avi, mp4, etc over minidlna, at least from a ReadyNAS.

Does anyone have any ideas about doing the same from my Dockstar?

Thanks again, Jonathan

[pepedog]

I have a feeling the minidlna community is best to as on this
http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/forums/forum/879956
You could always transcode, but on a plug it's very slow, could be 20 times slower than the realtime speed
Am seeing some nice Samsung players, quite cheap, than can play ok dlna. We have a special minidlna for Samsung compiled here.

[kmihelich]

Sony saying they only support mpeg-2 is basically a cop-out. You can stream any data format over DLNA, it's just on the end device to actually use it. Media players like the WDTV and friends have no issues with really any format since they can decode it.

[BinaryJay]

Trying to use these consumer devices as media streamers... it's not worth the hassle. You can build an amazing HTPC running XBMC for very small amounts of dollars that will make you disgusted that you even tried to do it otherwise.

[pedroren]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pepedog', 'I') have a feeling the minidlna community is best to as on this
http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/forums/forum/879956
You could always transcode, but on a plug it's very slow, could be 20 times slower than the realtime speed
Am seeing some nice Samsung players, quite cheap, than can play ok dlna. We have a special minidlna for Samsung compiled here.

[WarheadsSE]

Are you having problems with the current mindlna release? This thread is a year old.

[pepedog]

The Samsung version no longer works, regular one does but not quite as good as Samsung one did.