Serviio

Hi all,

I just discovered Serviio and it looks pretty cool, and possibly could help me with a problem I'm having.

I use J River Media Center, and have for many years. I have a huge library of video and audio, with custom metadata fields. Media Center provides a DLNA server and for a long time I've used that to output video to a couple of media devices. I also have it set up at my parents' house.

I just bought a Roku 3 for my Mum, to give her streaming content on a spare TV in her work room. I wanted this for Netflix, BBC iPlayer, etc, but I also very much wanted it as a DLNA client so she could access the media library I installed for my parents. And this is the problem - Roku 3's DLNA client (Roku Media Player) really doesn't like J River Media Center for some reason. Part of the problem is Roku's crappy support for media - I can get it to play some stuff when I put J River into "Original Format" mode (so it converts nothing). In that mode, the Roku will play some H264 stuff - but usually not with sound, unless it's AAC it seems. But it won't play 80% of the library which is in xVid and various other formats. No problem, I thought, I'll tell J River to convert everything - but that results in the Roku displaying almost no files at all, regardless of the format I told J River to convert to (tried H264 in TS, MPEG2 in TS, FLV, WMV, and some others.) I eventually got it to actually display the files when I hard coded J River's DLNA field to something like AVC_HD_24_AAC (I forget the exact name), and told J River to force convert to H264, but then the Roku wouldn't actually play the files (they stuck forever on the 'Receiving..' message)

So anyway, you can maybe guess now what I'm hoping to do. My searching suggests Serviio will work much better - it has a Roku profile by default, and if I still had problems it has the cool DLNA profiles and customisation features (which J River sadly lacks). But I really don't want to re-import all my media into Serviio, because then I have to maintain two libraries and I don't know if Serviio can do the custom metadata I use in J River - and even if it can, I don't know how I'd get it out of J River into Serviio. Even if Serviio's library is as good as J River's, I can't give up J River completely because I also use it as a local media player (the J River instance that I run the DLNA server on is also a Media PC connected to a TV and providing local playback via a remote control.)

So what I'm really hoping is to use Serviio as a DLNA bridge - kind of like a DLNA pass through. I want Serviio to use as its source the DLNA server provided by J River. Then I'd set J River to "original / no convert" mode, Serviio would read those files from J River and then pass them to the Roku, doing any conversion necessary. The CPU load should be minimal because I'd only be converting at one place, and the traffic from J River to Serviio would all be localhost.

But is this possible? Or am I going to have to think about importing all my media again into Serviio and then trying to keep the libraries in sync somehow?

Any help and advice would be much appreciated!

What you are thinking isn't really possible (there are probably ways to do it using live streams if you're technically minded, but it would be a less than satisfactory user experience - no pause , rewind, ffwd, etc for starters). Even then metadata wouldnt transport with the stream - so it wouldn't achieve what I think you want.

Serviio could share the same folders containing media files as does J River. Serviio will construct its own library - I cannot see any way around this.

One thought - if J River can export metadata to .nfo (xmbc format) then this may be a way to keep the two library's in sync - use J River to manage your library and periodically export it to .nfo files which Serviio can use as the metadata source for its own library. Other than that, if metadata customisation is required, I can't readily see a way to minimise the need to maintain two libraries. It probably comes down to how important is the need for customised metatdata - remembering most DLNA devices don't make use of much of the metadata anyway - its mainly media centres and if I read it correctly, you will continue to use the J River for this. Having said that I think the Roku is one device that does use more of metadata than most.

ps. to do metadata customisation in Serviio you need to use .nfo files or one of the other supported offline metadata sources. If you use online sources you cannot customise (but other than naming the media files in accordance with the schema - a once off hit - there is no real maintenance required).

OK thanks very much for the response.

Yes the live stream system won't be good if I can't pause, rewind, etc - I'd definitely want that.

I've installed Serviio and started importing my media. I'm going to have to do a fair bit of work to get the library in a suitable state - probably renaming all my TV shows to put them in an acceptable format for Serviio (something J River can do fairly easily, renaming all files using library fields.)

Regarding the NFOs - J River doesn't support these natively. Instead it uses its own XML system for storing metadata in files that don't have built-in tags - which I think applies to all video formats. So I should have one XML file per video file. I'm therefore fairly confident that I can write a script to convert the J River XML data into XMBC NFO format.

It's all a big hassle but I guess it's the only option I have for the time being - it's doubtful J River will extend their DLNA support any time soon. On the upside, I've had an ongoing minor issue on my existing DLNA device (a cheap Chinese unit) whereby because it could not play 100% of my video files (it can do 95%, but not all), I've had to set J River to convert - unfortunately, I presume due to a bug, this has caused J River to transcode every file it sends. So I'm suffering a CPU hit for every file, when only about 5% of files actually need to be transcoded. I did a quick test with Serviio and that DLNA unit eariler today, and it was not transcoding everything, so that's an improvement.

Thanks again for your help!

For file renaming help, look at Fliebot. It has the ability to perform bulk renaming, although I haven't investigated how it works. Even doing the naming manually is quite simple and can do many files at one time.

https://www.filebot.net/