Any chance of dumbed-down set up help please?

Hi,

Managed (more by luck than by design) to get serviio working on 10.04. Then it stopped, never to return.
Upgraded to 12.04, so thought I'd stab in the dark again. Telly is Sony KDL-40EX503.

I have looked at the wiki, but it is pretty gobbledy-gook to me. I am pretty sure I do not even know the correct questions to ask, so the search function yields nothing that jumps out at me as helpful.

I have managed to download Serviio - it is in a folder called Serviio-1.1, in downloads.
I think I have managed to make the serviio.sh a start-up application.

I am now totally at a loss.

I have no idea how to get the console to display.

I have no idea if I need to "build ffmpeg", less on how to, even less on what this means.

Sorry to be a total loss, but I am utterly clueless.

FWIW, when Serviio worked before, it was very good. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I did (it was once, about three years ago).

Any idiot-level help would be much appreciated

[patters]

I don't mean to be irritating, but Linux is far more complicated to master than Windows or Mac OS. On those operating systems, Serviio just installs and it works. But with Linux there's a lot more manual intervention required - Linux distributions vary a lot.

In answer to your question, FFmpeg is a media tool which will probably be included in your Linux distribution already. However, that version may not be compiled with the same additional libraries that some Serviio features depend on (such as libRTMP which is used to connect to online media streams). This is why, for best results, it's recommended to compile your own FFmpeg on Linux. This is pretty difficult though, so not really for beginners.

Once you have serviio.sh running as a process, you would start up the console using serviio-console.sh in the same folder. You will need Java installed though. I'm not sure whether this is included in your Linux distribution. If not, Serviio won't start. You could search Google for how to install Java on your particular Linux distro if not.

Not in the slightest irritating Patters - thanks for taking the time to help

I find Linux pretty decent for a lot of stuff, but you are totally correct - you really need to have a very open mind (and computer savvy) to get some things to work.

I'll go through the Java thing again, re-boot, and see where that gets me!

Thanks