Serviio

Hello!

I like Serviio a lot, bought a pro licence, know about the Mac security glitches... but currently it works... mostly good or as expected with my two SAMSUNGs in my local WI-FI network - even on latest macOS Sequoia BUT: Is there a per folder thumbnail limit or s.th.? In some folders containing e.g. 50 or more video files (of various types, mostly .mkv and .mp4) the built-in DLNA browser suddenly stops generating thumbs when I browse a folder and displays blanks instead. Obviously there seems to be no explanation for this behaviour?! I tried various namings or amounts in some test folders.

I hope someone can help!! Thanks a lot!

Best,
Tom

No limit I'm aware of. Of course, I'm running Windows, not MacOS. I have one folder with 573 files, and I just used MediaBrowser to scan the folder and I see thumbnails on every file.

That said, I gave up using the media players in my smart TVs (Samsung and LG) years ago because of their lousy user interface. My main go-to player is the Nvidia Shield (which is now 6 years from their last refresh), but I also use Roku players and several other Android based players (Fire TV Cube, Onn Media Player). On all of the Android devices I use Kodi as my primary player, but I also have VLC installed (great player, lousy UI).

Thanks for your fast answer! The Mac displays the Serviio mediabrowser grid with all the thumbs fast and perfect - so I think you're absolutely right with the lousy DLNA implementation of SAMSUNG! Now I'm thinking about a Screen mirroring solution for the media browser - without huge delays, of course. Alternatively, I could buy a HDMI streaming stick and do a WI-FI connect to the Mac and access the media folders as well. Can you recommend ROKU? I had enough sad experiences with Amazon, so FIRE is not an option for me. Chromecast? Miracast? Thank you!

I can recommend Roku, with a caveat. The only DLNA player app they have is the Roku Media Player, and Roku has basically ignored it for close to four years. It can play most anything with transcoding, but it's native media support is limited. It can't bitstream lossless audio, nor can it display image based text captions (almost all DVD/BD discs use image based captions). Serviio can burn those captions into the video stream, but then you have to transcode all video. And their media player has a bug with M2TS/TS files, in that you can't pause, FF, rewind or resume playback. But it works just fine with MKV, MOV and MP4 files (assuming the files have supported codecs, no transcoding needed).

If viewing captions is a priority for you, I recommend an Android based player, like the Shield, Fire TV or Chromecast, and use a player app like Kodi. Kodi takes a bit to set up for DLNA (it's disabled by default) but once it's set up it's all good.