Looking to make some space for the FireTV using some USBSticks. Trying to figure out what size would be recommended on a full regular XBMC setup & streaming apps & some games. (Not to many of the huge ones)
I have not install XBMC yet. But want to have the storage setup. Plan to us the StickMount method. But trying to figure out what size USBSticks I should start with. Don't want to go to small or to big. Trying to use the USBSticks I already own.
It is for 3 Fire TV's. I can either go 4GB + 4GB + 8GB Or 8GB + 8GB + 16GB Or if XBMC takes a ton of storage 16GB + 16GB + 16GB. I can just stream larger stuff like movies from a network drive connected to my router.
I will install some games & apps but not the huge ones. Read somewhere that the XBMC thumbnails can take a large amount of space. Want to avoid Low memory issues from the get go. Any info or direction would be appreciated.
Send your thumbnails to your NAS, I have no additional storage in mine, not a lot of games on it though. XBMC, a bunch of addons, all the prerequisite rooting stuff, a couple apps, few educational games for the kids... Still 2.5G free...
That should work... Guess I should run naked until I am on the last GB on the FireTV. One of the FireTV's will be wired to the router. Got any speed hit from accessing thumbnails on wifi ?
I run everything wired normally. If I'm wireless, it's a much smaller library and wireless has not been an issue.
KarlP said:
I run everything wired normally. If I'm wireless, it's a much smaller library and wireless has not been an issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
By library do you mean local media. I thought the thumbnail issue & low memory issue was due to XBMC streaming thumbnails taking up a lot of space cause of quantity?
Well, I have two setups (Home and Offline profiles).
Home - This is my main profile, it uses my MySQL DB server for it's library, and SMB shares for the actual video files as well as the thumbnails. The library contains some 5500 video files, and the Thumbnails folder takes up about 2.5G of space.
Offline - This is a travelling profile, with the library stored locally (userdata\database) and videos and thumbnails being stored on a USB connected hard drive. In this mode, the FireTV is also a wifi hotspot for my tablets, etc, sharing out the videos.. Depending on the length of use, I might have about 100 videos on the USB drive.
It's a different setup though, you're right, the FireTV is all using local storage, it's the iDevices, etc that are wireless. That might not be a good example to answer your question, however those same iDevices while at home use the same large centralized library (and thumbnails) and they are of course wireless. They don't struggle with the Thumbnails too much. Yes, they are a bit slower, but not horribly. Honestly I figured it was more because they were slower devices than wireless.
But, yes, one reason why people were having trouble with space was storing thumbnails in the userdata\Thumbnails folder within XBMC. As you can see, my library could take up over 2.5 G of space on the FireTV is left alone. I didn't configure it that way for the FireTV, that's always been my setup. I've got about 6 or 7 devices that all share the same content, so it made sense to have one library to feed them all. Thumbnails being different on different boxes caused me to centralize that.
KarlP said:
Well, I have two setups (Home and Offline profiles).
Home - This is my main profile, it uses my MySQL DB server for it's library, and SMB shares for the actual video files as well as the thumbnails. The library contains some 5500 video files, and the Thumbnails folder takes up about 2.5G of space.
Offline - This is a travelling profile, with the library stored locally (userdata\database) and videos and thumbnails being stored on a USB connected hard drive. In this mode, the FireTV is also a wifi hotspot for my tablets, etc, sharing out the videos.. Depending on the length of use, I might have about 100 videos on the USB drive.
It's a different setup though, you're right, the FireTV is all using local storage, it's the iDevices, etc that are wireless. That might not be a good example to answer your question, however those same iDevices while at home use the same large centralized library (and thumbnails) and they are of course wireless. They don't struggle with the Thumbnails too much. Yes, they are a bit slower, but not horribly. Honestly I figured it was more because they were slower devices than wireless.
But, yes, one reason why people were having trouble with space was storing thumbnails in the userdata\Thumbnails folder within XBMC. As you can see, my library could take up over 2.5 G of space on the FireTV is left alone. I didn't configure it that way for the FireTV, that's always been my setup. I've got about 6 or 7 devices that all share the same content, so it made sense to have one library to feed them all. Thumbnails being different on different boxes caused me to centralize that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sound like an awesome setup. But I don't have anywhere near that amount of content. I usually delete things once watched. Right now I am looking into this:
CWM Flashable: Mount external USB storage to /data and /sdcard as the best solution for the low memory problems.
KarlP said:
Send your thumbnails to your NAS, I have no additional storage in mine, not a lot of games on it though. XBMC, a bunch of addons, all the prerequisite rooting stuff, a couple apps, few educational games for the kids... Still 2.5G free...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you have a step by step for how to send the thumbnails to my NAS and have XBMC access them as needed? I think that would solve some storage issues for me if the mount script I have been trying doesn't end up working like I want it to.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2790246
That has all the info.. Don't forget to delete the Thumbnails folder on your firetv once you changed the location.
Related
So title explains it pretty well. I'm in the process of encoding all my Blu-Rays into my phone and my encodes are coming in just under 4gb so I'm okay there with the Fat32 limit but the media player wont play any of my files that are over 2gb. I just split them in half for now as a workaround but I was wondering if there's a way to modify the existing media player or perhaps a free market one that will work?
Unfortunately, Android apps cannot access files over 2GB in size. So you'll have to keep splitting them up. Or use a lower bitrate I've found that 2Mbps with two passes is plenty for a nice, crisp picture.
Hi everyone,
i just switched from an Iphone to the One X and i'm super happy with the hone, much better than the Iphone in most departments. There are only two things that bother me right now and i was wondering if there are solutions for them or at least upcoming software mods:
1. i have a great headset, the Sony XBA2-ip, with integrated Iphone controls, which I really want to keep. Right now I've gotten the play/pause button to work by downloading the headset button app. However the volume up/down buttons dont work and I cant seem to find a n app that will enable them. Is it impossible to make these buttons work?
2. The One X is a great phone for watching HD videos, esp. with Dice player. However I'm limited to 4GB file sizes when i transfer. I realize this is a limitation of the FAT32 formatting of the internal memory. What i wanted to ask was if there are ROM mods that allow to bypass that limit?
Thanks in advance.
I don't know the head set your referring to, however try some different players like power amp, winamp and n7 player and see what results you get, failing that a mod could be created but specifically for your headset i'm guessing that it won't happen so I would guess that there isn't a way around it, unless theres an app to map buttons to controls from within the device, u might get lucky, google it.
Not too sure about the 4GB limit, personally i've never had to transfer something so big onto a phone, if it's one file then i can only assume it's HD content, what i would do is split the file into smaller chunks using video editing software at least until a work around is in place.
Welcome to android by the way, it is better by the way More freedom, something apple knows very little about.
Also depends on the file systems that are natively supported by your PC's OS. Some custom ROMs will probably try try to format the internal storage into ext4 but it's not natively supported in Windows XP I think. By that I mean if you plug it into your pc, it won't recognize it as a USB Storage. I think Windows 7 supports ext4, but I think you need some driver updates or something. Ext4 has a much larger file size limit
I think PowerAMP is the most powerful one with lots of options and wouldn't be surprised to see it supporting those volume keys.
I'm wondering about 4GB limit too, hoping there is a workaround or maybe custom ROMs will solve it. Most of my files are 4-9GB in size.
But as long as I'm in range of my network, DicePlayer plays them brilliantly over the network, I use ES File Explorer to map my LAN drives.
For players that are not able to play from networked drives, the solution is to use CIFSManager which mounts networked drives as a local subfolder, fooling player apps into thinking they are playing local files. DicePlayer doesn't need that workaround.
Thanks for all the info guys. I will try these solutions and will report what happens. Hopefully once custom ROMs start popping up many of these problems will be resolved, esp. the 4GB limit, it must something many users are struggling with...
just testing this theory but it should be possible to take the file that is bigger than 4GB, use a program such as winrar to split it into 2 or more files so that they are small enough for transfer, then use unrar from the play store to unpack them.
A long method, but a decent one when given the limitation of a fat filesystem.
Hopefully i'll confirm whether this works as soon as i've had chance to test it.
EDIT: I realise this won't work unless there is a media player that can play files straight from part-rars... don't know of any with this feature.
An alternative would be to split your video file into so many parts and just put them in a queue when watching.
Thanks for the extra info.
FYI, I tried different music players (DBpwoeramp, Winamp) and headphone apps and none of them even see my volume buttons. I did some more reading on the forums and it seems no one has ever found a solution for this. it sucks cause my headphones are great...
On the 4GB file size front no dice yet but I remain more hopeful that it will be fixed once people start tinkering with the file system.
i dont know if it will work but archos fans forum has a program that seems to split hd movies that will play
heres the thread
http://forum.archosfans.com/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=42082
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
im gona give it a shot when i have a few moments spare.
Hi everyone,
just wanted to update this tread to say i found a partial solution to the headset problem. I downloaded the free Jays app that controls headsets and mapped volume up/down to long keypresses of the main button. It's not perfect but at least i regain most of the missing functionality, and i dont have to change my headset (as i mentioned I really like the Sony headset).
Now if the ROM developers could find a solution to the 4GB limit (fingers crossed), I'd be all set.
great find on that headset app, i was about to buy headset control but jays is free!
Does anyone know of an app that will play media from a network share? Ive tried Diceplayer and it doesnt seem to support mkvs... If I can find an app that will stream media off my local shares, this will finally be my "one box to rule them all" as it supports all the services Im interested in, I just want to be able to stream my local media. I DONT want to use Plex or XBMC.. I have a Plex server running and it runs great however I have a catch all folder where downloaded stuff goes before I move it into whatever directory its going to live in and thats the content I want to be able to play.
Anyone got any suggestions?
MadFlava said:
Does anyone know of an app that will play media from a network share? Ive tried Diceplayer and it doesnt seem to support mkvs... If I can find an app that will stream media off my local shares, this will finally be my "one box to rule them all" as it supports all the services Im interested in, I just want to be able to stream my local media. I DONT want to use Plex or XBMC.. I have a Plex server running and it runs great however I have a catch all folder where downloaded stuff goes before I move it into whatever directory its going to live in and thats the content I want to be able to play.
Anyone got any suggestions?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try archos media player. I haven't tried it yet but it supports SMB. If you come across anything better, let me know
Well, its not an all in one solution, but...
Install VLC for Android and ES file explorer.
In ES file explorer when you try and open an MKV it will ask what app you want to use. tell it VLC and you are in.
The bad news is that the beta of VLC does not appear to support any controls on the Fire remote. It will take
"mouse" command from the cheap MCE remote that people are using as an InfraRed receiver.
Is there a reason XBMC is out? It can be setup to just show your movies and shows without doing any scraping or anything other then just letting you get to your network shares and play it.
I haven't had the greatest luck with XBMC. Ive set it up on numerous devices and its probably that I just end up getting frustrated with it. I ran it naively back in my original Xbox but now I just cant seem to get a handle on seeing it up to my liking. Plex has been great but I don't think my server has enough Wheaties to handle maybe more than 2 streams which is why I've been looking for something to just stream content across the network.
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You should try Vimu Player. You won't even have to sideload it is in the fire tv store.
I haven't tried it on the fire tv but I used to use it a lot on my Logitech Revue Google Tv. It doesn't have all the features of xbmc or plex but it did a great job streaming video from my NAS.
skinnydev said:
You should try Vimu Player. You won't even have to sideload it is in the fire tv store.
I haven't tried it on the fire tv but I used to use it a lot on my Logitech Revue Google Tv. It doesn't have all the features of xbmc or plex but it did a great job streaming video from my NAS.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ill give it a shot. I have Plex set up and it works great for me. But I have kids and they want to stream stuff too and Im concerned that my media server isnt going to have the Wheaties to stream that much stuff so the option of being able to play directly from the share is what Im after. My Plex server is an Athlon Phenom II X3 with 16GB of RAM.. really doesnt do anything but run Plex, SabNZB and PlayOn..
Thanks for the heads up!
I use MX Player and Skifta on my android devices to access my DLNA server. So you can give MX Player a try it handles mkvs perfectly fine.
Vimu looks like it has a lot of potential but sadly most of my MKV files dont have sound and I cant really find any settings to change for that. Im going to give MX Player a shot now.. I dont know if thats DLNA only but if it is, thats not what Im looking for. I just want to be able to stream without transcoding on the server side.
MX Player isn't DLNA only it can handle other network streams just fine as long as you know what they are.
DLNA is just happens to be how I push my media files around the house to my devices.
Yea.. I looked at it and couldnt find a way to browse to shares... Im using a Mede8r for playing from network shares right now.. Im so close to being able to ditch everything except the FireTV.. if I could find a good network player that just plays, I could get rid of all my other boxes. I really want the "one box to rule them all" thing......
Try using es file explorer to browse to the share and ND for playback?
Montisaquadeis said:
Try using es file explorer to browse to the share and ND for playback?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had issues with ES working with the Amazon remote. Are you using an external keyboard/mouse to control it?
Personally I do not have a Fire TV. Just trying to help out is all.
A keyboard and mouse should work fine. Even an air mouse should be ok as well if you want to go that route.
I'm really surprised that Qloud Media doesn't get more attention. You install it as a server on either Windows or Mac, point it at your media and that's it.
Run the client on Android, iOS or Windows devices, plug in the server PIN and you're off. Done and done.
The video is transcoded on the fly, so streaming over the internet results in a lower-quality image at times, but it's certainly watchable.
The GUI isn't fancy, but quite functional. The server end has almost no bells and whistles. You could think of it as Plex-ultra-lite, so there's no overhead processing going on. The server exists only to serve media and that's all. No indexing of your collection, no downloading cover images, etc. It just streams media from whatever source you choose and I haven't had any problems streaming anything in my collection, even .mkv files encoded with AC3 audio that the Chromecast won't touch.
I just loaded the client up to my new FTV last night and again, it works perfectly.
The only minor drawback is that the aspect ratio is a bit weird when viewed on the FTV. It's not perfectly 16:9 but more like 15:9, so the image is a bit squished in from the sides. You don't really notice it after a few minutes though.
Im surprised it's 6 months later and there is still no easy way of playin network shared files, say from a NAS device with a media server, on a Fire TV without having to sideload an app. If I'm wrong please correct me. I did try ViMu but it couldn't play any of my files (mostly MP4s) - everyone said it was unable to play. Currently I use an XBox 360 to browse/watch videos, which I have fairly organized into folders. Why is this so difficult? My Sony TV has a player but it doesn't support folders so its hundreds of videos just in alphabetical order by filename which isn't ideal- plus you can only read the first few characters of the file name without looking at a detailed view so no way to tell what specific file you're looking at if they all start with the same word.
Yes I tried XMBC but it's way overkill, I don't need or want custom artwork per file, it crashes, and it's also not something I can put in the regular fite tv menu. Also XMBC doesn't play 720p content full screen for some reason.
Has anyone had better luck?
Edit ---------------------------
Well after some more trial and error I ended up using Llama to auto start XBMC in place of some other random app so I basically have XMBC on my main Fire TV screen. I also deleted all XBMC data and didn't run any file scrapers this time, and only access files via the Windows Network Share, so it is a much cleaner looking interface like I wanted. Finally the screen size issue was actually the entire Fire TV screen size which I had to enlarge in the Fire TV Display settings. Even maxed out it doesn't 100% fill the screen but it's much closer, I can live with it. Although I didn't bring it up I was also having an issue with the time display I was blaming on XMBC but was again the Fire TV itself was set to Pacific time- you'd think Amazon would have set the timezone right.
Anyway I feel it's much than it was earlier- still occasional crashes on XBMC but not too bad. Just wish I didn't was a few dollars downloading paid apps that didn't work as I thought they were supposed to.
If XBMC is crashing, consider trying SPMC (fork of XBMC). Its available in the Amazon app store (but for the Stick it must be side loaded).
I'm using it on my FTV Stick, and its been solid. No crashes or hangs.
Does anyone know why my MX Player stop playing on my one box it's saying cannot play link it's on my firestick on TV
hi m8s i got this message half way thru a film LOW STORAGE PLEASE REMOVE SOME APPS OR VIDEO STREAMING QUALITY WILL SUFFER , i have only had the box a week , this was not mentioned in the procure LOL
PS whats the cure
What's on there? You can delete any ROM images and whatnot if you're gone through all the rooting/clockwork/custom rom guides. Also, XBMC thumbnail cache can get large with a large library. I'd offload your thumbnails folder to a NAS if you can (there's a thread or two about it here). I've seen a few games that also have huge footprints, i.e. Asphalt games. The box only has 8Gigs.
I haven't gotten that message yet, I have a large movie library (500+ movies and 4000+ TV shows) so I knew that offloading the Thumbnails was going to be important. The Thumbnail cache on my NAS is 2.5G.
I'm used to connect SD cards or hard drives to my phone with OTG to quickly edit videos or work on pictures. But unfortunately the stock Gallery app and also others such as KineMaster, Power Director, Google Photos etc don't see the drive connected with media in it. Is there a way to force these apps to show it?
What's your experience?
Thanks
I have never seen in gallery files stored outside the device, tbh, I had always copied them into the device to work on them
I got it to work with Samsung's "My Files" app.
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winol said:
I have never seen in gallery files stored outside the device, tbh, I had always copied them into the device to work on them
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Click to collapse
That is such a disappointment. I use it to quickly connect and edit videos from my action camera, or to edit videos stored in a HD with terabytes of files! I can't believe all the people using galaxy devices to actually work have all the necessary files in the internal storage!
gernerttl said:
I got it to work with Samsung's "My Files" app.
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
True, file managers can see the external storage, but you can't access that same storage from gallery or media apps to work with video edit or photos.
Yes and no.
The Gallery app doesn't see external USB devices. But when you use My Files to open a photo, it will ask which app to use; Gallery is one of those choices.
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gernerttl said:
Yes and no.
The Gallery app doesn't see external USB devices. But when you use My Files to open a photo, it will ask which app to use; Gallery is one of those choices.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, but you can't do much. There's no edit button. Same thing if you open a video from "my files" with the video player app. The editor feature is gone.
I basically bought the note 10+ to do these things. Can someone check if using DEX is the same? Can you edit a video with Adobe Rush working on files stored in an external hard drive?
It is easier to transfer the files you need into the device
5ne1ke said:
Yes, but you can't do much. There's no edit button. Same thing if you open a video from "my files" with the video player app. The editor feature is gone.
I basically bought the note 10+ to do these things. Can someone check if using DEX is the same? Can you edit a video with Adobe Rush working on files stored in an external hard drive?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not sure you can "manually" trigger DeX on the Note 10+. The only way I know is to either plug it into a DeX supported USB-C hub, DeX dock, USB-C to HDMI adaptor, or plug it into a Windows or Mac running Samsung DeX.
winol said:
It is easier to transfer the files you need into the device
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I usually work with terabytes of video files, transferring everything in the internal memory is obviously not an option.
gernerttl said:
I'm not sure you can "manually" trigger DeX on the Note 10+. The only way I know is to either plug it into a DeX supported USB-C hub, DeX dock, USB-C to HDMI adaptor, or plug it into a Windows or Mac running Samsung DeX.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Of course I mean connecting the phone to a monitor or a computer. I currently have no chance to try, can someone check if it's the same thing in DEX mode, eg. video editing apps can't access media stored on an external drive?
I can't believe this is how it works. There's an incredible amount of videos on YouTube showing off the video editing capabilities of this phone (and that's why I got it in the first place) and I can't believe nobody has pointed this out.
It's one of two things: either I'm missing something to make it work, or all those people are just showing off and they actually don't do any serious work on the phone. (Just marketing?)
5ne1ke said:
I usually work with terabytes of video files, transferring everything in the internal memory is obviously not an option.
Of course I mean connecting the phone to a monitor or a computer. I currently have no chance to try, can someone check if it's the same thing in DEX mode, eg. video editing apps can't access media stored on an external drive?
I can't believe this is how it works. There's an incredible amount of videos on YouTube showing off the video editing capabilities of this phone (and that's why I got it in the first place) and I can't believe nobody has pointed this out.
It's one of two things: either I'm missing something to make it work, or all those people are just showing off and they actually don't do any serious work on the phone. (Just marketing?)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It seems to be a problem with apps not the phone or the OS. Many if not most apps are optimized to use internal or microSD storage. The whole point of OTG isn't to do the editing on the files stored on the external device, but to share files between devices.
I am a photographer and I don't edit files on an external device like a USB drive or thumbdrive. I copy them to a NAS for both storage and editing. If I am away from my main system for an extended period, I copy them to my Surface Pro and do basic editing on that and then move them to my NAS when I get back.
The Note 10+ is a beast of a phone, but it still isn't quite as good as video editing on a Windows or Mac (or even Linux) PC.
My only reccomendation for now is to copy the files to the microSD card then edit from it. The connection between the phone and the microSD card is faster than an external USB device.
gernerttl said:
It seems to be a problem with apps not the phone or the OS. Many if not most apps are optimized to use internal or microSD storage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't agree on this. Also, they are the same apps that worked flawlessly on previous devices I had. On the LG phone I had before, I could see ask the folders containing pictures or videos in Google photos, perform a backup, or edit video in those apps I mentioned. So my guess is that it's a Samsung restriction.
I wonder if rooting might allow a workaround. Anyone with root with this experience?
5ne1ke said:
I don't agree on this. Also, they are the same apps that worked flawlessly on previous devices I had. On the LG phone I had before, I could see ask the folders containing pictures or videos in Google photos, perform a backup, or edit video in those apps I mentioned. So my guess is that it's a Samsung restriction.
I wonder if rooting might allow a workaround. Anyone with root with this experience?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I used a USB-C hub to trigger DeX and plugged in a thumb drive with a small video file. All I could do was play the video from My Files. Samsung Gallery did not see the video until I copied it to internal storage. The same goes for the SD Card. At that point I could open it and edit it.
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