Serviio

Hi there.

I've been trying J River Media Center - DLNA vs. Serviio lately.

I'd like to give you an update about things ongoing out there.

Please don't take it as critisizm - consider this post as constructive feedback.

It's my personal view of course.


Let start with the summary first:

Serviio delivers much better video quality and device support (DVD level on JRMC side).
Serviiio also delivers a much better streaming performance - no stuttering videos and overall server performance.
Rewind and forward is working properly - JRMC fails on that.

With those features Serviio is making the big points.


JRMC wins on the usebility and flexibilty side
What struck me most on JRIver is:

1. Language support - prefered language selection
2. Subtitle support - pretty much all formats hardcoded into the stream
3. Raw images (.nef) transcoding
4. multiple server instances (one server per deviice and/or service)
5 . Very flexible menu customisation - you define what's exacly been shown on the renderer
6. Cover art support ( finds any folder.jpg or similar and crops and uses it as cover art for display on TV)
7. Pretty easy installation
8. With my Serviio 1.0.1 installation hazzle in mind - JRMC is more stable.
9. Android remote control that connects renderer/clients and server.

Even though there's a long list of pro-JRMC items on the JRMC side.

What counts is the video quality and server performance. That's why Serviio wins the battle from my perspective.


However. I do think Serviio needs to speed its evolution up.

Otherwise JRMC will pass by sooner or later. For now Serviio remains my prefered DLNA server.

If you folks do not consider JRMC a competitor you can forget about this post.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers
SC

What's your renderer? Serviio can already pick up folder.jpg cover art - look in the Audio section of the Metadata tab in the console.
For Android stuff, have you seen ServiDroid and ServiGo?
When you mention language support - do you mean for the menus and stuff, or do you mean for audio/subtitles? For the former, Serviio is already fairly comprehensively translated and for the latter I think Zip is intending to add those features to version 1.1:
https://bitbucket.org/xnejp03/serviio/i ... ection-for
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6688&p=48290#p48290

I'm not sure I'd call Serviio installation complicated. On Linux maybe, but on a PC or Mac it's as straightforward as any other media server in my opinion. It only gets complicated if you need to start adapting profiles for your particular device, which hopefully gets less likely as those profiles evolve. As you pointed out, minimizing transcoding and exploiting the devices' own native support as much as possible is very much a priority, but this does tend to make the device profiles more complex to understand.

I'm running a Sony KDL HX925 2011 and a Linux server (Ubuntu Server - 12.04).

JRMC Gizmo (Android) is something else then ServioDroid or similar.


With language support I'm refering to the audio stream.

folder.jpg I related to video. Basically on the TV ( my Sony) - I'd like to be able to
go on the first layer of the DLNA server menu and find there a folder.jpg based icon+folder-name as movie name
(instead of clicking down into the folder/bdmv/stream structure to select there a 00006.mts. That's possible with JRMC.

And as I said, beside its exhausting Linux installation ( it requires in depth Linux knowledge) + ffmpeg compilation,
I consider the lack of subtitle support and language stream selection major weaknesses of Serviio. (I've been discussing this earlier).

I'm well aware that Serviio depends at least regarding subtitle support (hardcoded into the stream) on ffmpeg. Butthen it also needs to be implemented
into the console apps.

Raw image format transcoding should be no-brainer. The tools to do it are available
since years.

Customizations of the menu structure incl. cover arts you need to try by yourself .
That's dificult to explain. You can run a JRMC test license to see what I'm talking about.

I'm well aware that Serviio is still a freeware tool. And all what's done means hell of an effort. ( I contribute myself freeware to the community btw)
From that perspective I should be more then happy for what it does. And as I said. I am.

As I see Serviio is on its way into commercial terrain. Fair enough. To survive out
there Serviio needs to speed up though.

Unfortunately the cooperation with Sony doesn't seem to develop that well. That could
have been a differentiator for the future. Sony IMO gotta pretty weak spot on its DLNA
side. Making Sony to move on , being pushed from the Serviio side won't be very successful I guess.

Anyhow. All this is my view - as a little more advanced user.

Cheers

Ah, I realised after I posted that you had also posted in that thread about alternate audio stream support...

I think there's a ticket for folder icon support at least, even if folder.jpg can't be used for video.

I agree about RAW image support and dynamic resizing when the image exceeds the device's resolution limit. I think in theory the latter is supposed to already be integrated but it hasn't worked whenever I've tried it.

Though I've compiled FFmpeg for the Synology packages, I still don't really understand why a statically compiled FFmpeg can't be included in the Linux build. I would have thought that the whole point of statically compiling is that there aren't any dependencies. I mean the Synology Intel binary of FFmpeg I made using Ubuntu running on my MacBook Air, and that works fine.

MOstly as there are a lot of different distributions, CPU architectures etc - would that not require a lot of downloadable editions?

As I see it (and I'm by no means an expert) I think the main issue would be one of glibc version (since the other libs are static). However, I would hazzard a guess that the recent builds of the "main" distros are quite likely to use the same one. As long as you compile for Intel, you could compile with the "check CPU features on execution" option which I think FFmpeg has. I might compile one on Ubuntu that we could get Linux users of other distros to test.