I have a
Sony bdp-s580 BD player which is supposed to be able to access a DLNA compatible network device and play media (video files and still images) from it.
I have a Buffalo 2TB network drive.
All is on ethernet (no wifi being used).
The Sony player can see the drive allright but it sees only some directories on it, and within those it sees only some files, even though there are many other files there of the same type.
This is irrespective of whether I have the DLNA server on the network drive enabled.
The files it finds will play if they are stills (jpegs) but not video files, although all of these play fine if put on a DVD which then plays in the player directly.
There is a lot of stuff on google about DLNA basically "not working sometimes"
and it seems to be another "technology with a great tomorrow" but I wonder if the behaviour whereby there seems to be a basic fault in file browsing might ring any bells?
Internet/network access works fine, with the Iplayer app on the BD drive working fine. The player is brand new but the model is about 1 year old, but I loaded latest firmware anyway, and same with the network drive which is 1-2 years old.
Is there some simple DLNA test software one could use to test the Buffalo network drive?
Both the network drive and the BD player are on fixed IPs on the LAN, although having a dynamic IP on the player (and use the router to allocate it an IP using DHCP as normal) makes no difference.
I knew that media playback off a network drive is a huge area of incompatibility with different
media streamer products not playing certain file formats (I gave a DVD with various files I have to a friend with one of these and he could play only half of them) but this looks like a file browsing issue rather than a media/file-format type issue, because the same files play fine off a DVD.
We bought the BD drive mainly to play DVDs and Iplayer but it would be nice to at least be able to watch a slide show of still images on it, but even that doesn't work, with the few directories it does display showing only one picture, out of hundreds.
If DLNA works, how does it work? Does it somehow identify only media files on the network drive and present only those to the client, or do you still browse the network drive with the remote control's up/down/select buttons as before?
I normally avoid Sony products because they tend to be crippled according to the latest Sony business objective (recently they removed DIVX support from some of their products) and the quality is no longer great, but we bought this player (against other options such as LG which also does Iplayer) on the recommendation that the existing Sony TV remote controller might work with it, and indeed it does.
As a separate project, I wonder if anybody knows about batch video file conversion... I have basically three file formats, from various camcorders I have owned:
1) .avi
These came from a Sony PC100 DV camcorder, or a Panasonic DV camcorder whose name I forget. They were transferred from DV tapes using a DV camcorder used as player using a utility called windv.exe. Most of these have 12-bit sound,
AFAIK, not 16-bit, and VLC doesn't play the sound correctly. WMP plays them fine, suprisingly.
2) .m2t
These came from a Sony HDR-HC1E HD camcorder. They were transferred from DV tapes using a utility called hdvsplit.exe
3) .mts
These are from a Canon Legria HF-G10, and transferred using drag and drop
They are in the highest res, avchd.
Types 2) and 3) play on the Sony BD player OK, off a DVD (although curiously type 2 has a bit rate a little too high for the plain-DVD playback speed in the Sony) but type 1 will need a batch converter... They are in a directory structure, sorted by the year i.e. just one level.
I know I could buy a dedicated media streamer but a) that is yet another remote control to keep track of, and b) I don't think any media streamer will play the type 1 files with the 12-bit audio track. These will have to be converted.