I have Ubuntu 10.04 installed in my laptop. I installed MediaTomb in it. There are some annoying issues when starting the server or adding an UPnP library. That aside, my N900 finds the MediaTomb server and plays the video and audio files.
If someone can answers the questions below, I would be grateful. I couldn't find a clear answer in the past 3 days.
1. I couldn't do seeking when playing videos from MediaTomb. Most of my video files are in .avi format. Is there a solution? I read through some instructions for Knots2, but, it is a little too complex for me right now. Even then, I am not sure if it will solve the 'seeking' problem.
2. Instead of using something like MediaTomb, is there way I can simply access all the files on my laptop through home network.
3. I am also planning to buy a Addonics NAS adaptor and convert one of my external hard drives into a NAS device. Would I be able to access it from N900? Once again, will the seeking work in video files? How about copying, editing, deleting the files in NAS?
A CIFS or SMB wouldn't work out of the box with the N900. I think the wizardmounter app has support for CIFS but I haven't tried this.
Seeking in videos streamed over the network only works if
1) The media server supports this (MediaTomb does)
2) The video file has index information at its beginning (most likely you cannot seek because the index is missing). Some AVI tools may be able to add an index.
I will double check the AVI index on my video files. If I remember correctly, VLC and Totem Media player in Ubuntu were able to seek without any issue. Doesn't that mean the index is already present? Will check this and post the results...
The index is not so important for seeking when the file is local. Some players (e.g. mplayer with option --forceidx) can automatically build an index quickly in this case.
But for HTTP streaming this is not so easy.
I have several video files on a UPnP share and only some of them support seeking (I'm currently using minidlna UPnP server on Ubuntu, and MediaBox as UPnP client on N810 and N900).
If the UPnP server is configured to do automatic transcoding, then seeking might become impossible, too.
Thanks for the link. But, I understood very little of what is written. The article is talking about adding an extension to GStreamer, which is beyond me. It would be great to have some instructions from end-user point of view on how to do that.
