HELP with Panasonic Viera App, DLNA and XBMC

[mbhangui]

All my movies are on my HTPC. I use XBMC. I am currently staying in a temporary rented house where I have space constraints because of which the HTPC is in one room and TV is in one of the bedroom. Hence I cannot connect the HTPC directly to the TV using HDMI or VGA cable.

1. My HTPC is in the living room connected to a stereo amp. I use Apple Airport express to do PPPOE on a you telecom router which is at one end of the living room. The HTPC's ethernet port is connected to another Airport Router which participates in WDS and has the ethernet port bridged. Hence the HTPC is theoritically on a wireless N network

2. My TV (Panasonic P65VT30d) which has DLNA enabled is in my bedroom. I have another Airport Express in the bedroom powerd on to act as a repeater. So the wireless signal is excellent even in the bedroom. The TV has a wireless N dongle connected to the same wi-fi network as the HTPC

3. I have a apple tv 1080p with airplay enabled connected to HDMI1 port of the TV. This Apple tv connects to the networking using wifi.

4. I have downloaded the air video server on IPAD and Viera App on my android tablet. The android viera app works flawlessly as a remote. but.....

I am able to play movies flawlessly on the Apple TV, without any jerks or stutters, using the airvideo app on ipad.

On the TV, XBMC gets discovered using DLNA. But you just cannot play any movie smoothly. The experience is pathetic.

Even the way youtube plays on Apple TV far much better than Viera Tools. I also noticed that it take time for the Photos (over the wifi network) to display on the TV. After one has experienced Apple TV, the so called smart features of Panasonic Viera can be termed as some childish attempts at coding. Is anyone else using the Viera Tools on the TV with good user experience?

So question is
Is Panasonic Viera DLNA the culprit or it could be something to do with XBMC. I don't think the problem is with bandwidth as Apple TV does a much better job streaming the same content from the PC to the TV.

Has anyone enabled UPNP on XBMC and played the content on your PC to the TV?

 

[amitk777]

May be I do not understand correctly, but why XBMC is run on the HTPC ? do you have a TV connected to HTPC also ? If not why not try a plain vanilla DLNA server like Mediatomb ?

 

[mbhangui]

May be I do not understand correctly, but why XBMC is run on the HTPC ? do you have a TV connected to HTPC also ? If not why not try a plain vanilla DLNA server like Mediatomb ?

xbmc happens to be my preferred software for managing my video. It has a lovely interface and plays all formats.

I used to have a tv connected to HTPC earlier at Chennai. However I have recently shifted to Pune and staying in a rented flat where I do not have a large living room. Hence my 65"" tv is in the bedroom and HTPC which needs to be connected to my stereo system (music remains to be my primary need) is in the sitting room. All my video also lies on the HTPC and hence the need to play the video on the HTPC remotely on the TV. This need is satisfied by a apple TV. However if I can do it natively through DLNA then I can free up my apple TV and use it in my son's bedroom which has a LG tv with absolutely no smart features. Else I have to buy a new apple tv. DLNA is working, but the quality is pathetic.

I am just exploring if DLNA feature of Panasonic can be used to provide the same level of performance which apple tv is providing. More I think about it, it looks like Apple is far ahead of the smart tv features which exists with Panasonic Viera. At the moment I find the quality of Viera smart features unacceptable and almost every feature which is common to apple tv and viera smart tool gets done better in apple tv.

One forum member has replied that this could be because of bandwidth. Viera Tools is not smart enough to adjust the streaming to prevent jerks in the video. However, I need to confirm if all members who are using DLNA face the same issue.

EDIT1: I am looking at mediatomb and thanks for suggesting that. Maybe it is xbmc that is the culprit.

EDIT2: Ooops it looks like junk OS like windows is not supported by mediatomb. Unfortunately I have to run my HTPC on windows only because of Itunes. One of these days I seriously need to get out of IPOD and trash my windows 7 system with Fedora.

 

[amitk777]

I have a linux box so my only experience has been on Mediatomb and minidlna. Perhaps Apple TV/ Itunes server does some buffering or optimization because of which you do not notice the lag/stuttering. There is a big list of dlna servers on link, if even then its not corrected then it is Panasonic that is culprit. Windows itself has Windows media center which acts as a upnp server.

List of UPnP AV media servers and clients - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[mbhangui]

I tried ushare on my fedora laptop. Somehow it is not getting listed in the veira connect. In the meantime I also tried mediamonkey upnp on my Windows 7 HTPC. Had the same performance issue. The media gets listed but scrolling to next page is extremely slow.
From what I have read on the net, DLNA on Panasonic is not smooth.

Few more options I will try
1) install mediatomb on Fedora and see if it works
2) Connect the tv and the HTPC to a 100mbps switch

Any Forum members who have tried DLNA on their smart tvs? What has been your experience?

 

[miniwarmth]

I've tried the same test: just use DLNA or use my media client (Plex). With DLNA via the Panasonic, I had to wait a bit for it to load all the metadata. Otherwise the playback was painful/not useable. I think I waited about 10-15 minutes for my 2TB collection to load and then tried again and had no issues. How big is your library?

I'm using Plex & iTunes as my media manager and have an Airport Extreme connected to another AEx wirelessly in bridge mode. One thing to keep in mind is that for every add'l device you use to wireless bridge (e.g. airport express), you loose half the bandwidth -- so signal will be high but b/w will get reduced.

 

[mbhangui]

I've tried the same test: just use DLNA or use my media client (Plex). With DLNA via the Panasonic, I had to wait a bit for it to load all the metadata. Otherwise the playback was painful/not useable. I think I waited about 10-15 minutes for my 2TB collection to load and then tried again and had no issues. How big is your library?

I'm using Plex & iTunes as my media manager and have an Airport Extreme connected to another AEx wirelessly in bridge mode. One thing to keep in mind is that for every add'l device you use to wireless bridge (e.g. airport express), you loose half the bandwidth -- so signal will be high but b/w will get reduced.

My library is around 1 TB. I also have AEx in bridge mode connected to HTPC while the TV is connected through the panasonic wireless N dongle.

From what you say, my problem could be due to bandwidth.

 

[mbhangui]

Update: I enabled upnp, ssdp services on windows and enabled media sharing in windows. I find no problem in scrolling through the list of movies and viera shows up in the list of devices on the HTPC. Absolutely no problem in getting the meta data displayed on the tv. So it looks like the upnp on xbmc and mediamonkey is a problem. Also in windows media player there is an option to play the movie on detected upnp devices.

The only problem with doing this through windows is that the boot time of HTPC gets delayed on account of starting of few more services. So my hunt for a good media server which supports upnp continues.

Another good discovery on Panasonic viera (I have to try it myself). You can connect a hard disk and format it in "Viera Hard disk format". The format destroys existing data on the hard disk. But once you do that, you can Pause play rewind tv just like tata sky+. Since the viera connect software is a FreeBSD implementation, Under Linux, the partition has a System ID of a5 (or 165 decimal) which is the ID for FreeBSD partition. Linux fdisk says file system type is unknown. I will try a FreeBSD live CD and try mounting it. Alternatively I can load a FreeBSD fs driver on my fedora core laptop and see if it works. My guess is that this hard disk should also get recognized in Mac OSX.

 

[miniwarmth]

Another good discovery on Panasonic viera (I have to try it myself). You can connect a hard disk and format it in "Viera Hard disk format". The format destroys existing data on the hard disk. But once you do that, you can Pause play rewind tv just like tata sky+. Since the viera connect software is a FreeBSD implementation, Under Linux, the partition has a System ID of a5 (or 165 decimal) which is the ID for FreeBSD partition. Linux fdisk says file system type is unknown. I will try a FreeBSD live CD and try mounting it. Alternatively I can load a FreeBSD fs driver on my fedora core laptop and see if it works. My guess is that this hard disk should also get recognized in Mac OSX.

Glad you got things working...sorta.

I'm really interested in what you find with the HD recording. I posted this on the ST50 thread sometime ago and was never able to get it working. The option that necessary to format/record/use isn't shown and appears to be a feature for UK (and maybe other markets too).

 

[sud98]

There are lots of good DLNA apps to use (XBMC is not one of them). XBMC is great to use as an HTPC solution directly connected to the TV.

The apps to use for Windows would be

1. TVersity
2. Serviio
3. PS3 Media Server

I had written an article on setting up a DLNA sometime back in the forum, use the search function to find it.

I use PS3 media server for my Viera works great. I use Tversity on my blu ray player just to differentiate the two. But then I use wired connection, so not aware of the issues with wireless.

 

[mbhangui]

There are lots of good DLNA apps to use (XBMC is not one of them). XBMC is great to use as an HTPC solution directly connected to the TV.

The apps to use for Windows would be

1. TVersity
2. Serviio
3. PS3 Media Server

I had written an article on setting up a DLNA sometime back in the forum, use the search function to find it.

I think this is the article you wrote
http://www.hifivision.com/media-streaming-players/17351-dummies-guide-setup-free-home-media-n-w.html

 

[sud98]

Yes, thats the one.

BTW, whats the format of the movies that you have in your HTPC? Are they in one format like mkv or they are in different ones?

For some reasons, most DLNA players are not very efficient in doing on-the-fly conversion esp. after seeing the way Air Video does it in my ipad. So its faster to use native formats. PS3 media server is probably the best option if you need to do realtime conversions.

 

[mbhangui]

Yes, thats the one.

BTW, whats the format of the movies that you have in your HTPC? Are they in one format like mkv or they are in different ones?

For some reasons, most DLNA players are not very efficient in doing on-the-fly conversion esp. after seeing the way Air Video does it in my ipad. So its faster to use native formats. PS3 media server is probably the best option if you need to do realtime conversions.

Most of them are mkv and yes, I also am using air video to do on-the-fly transcoding. Since you have found PS3 media server good, I will also try the same and eliminate using IPAD everytime I have to see a movie