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10:05 am
January 16, 2012
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tboheeren
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Hey michell,
After testing the MovieBrowser app, I was wondering what the status is of the uPnP/SMB/NAS support in Mizuu. Is it still going to be included in 1.8?
Are there also plans for the 'play to' feature where you choose an external uPnp/DLNA player?
Thanks for any information.
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3:32 pm
January 16, 2012
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Michell Bak
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Hey!
Yep, both coming in version 1.8. It's a rather complex thing to implement, so it's taking some time.
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4:39 pm
August 1, 2012
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SoonerLater
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Michell,
I must ask what you (probably) hate to be asked: when will a version with SMB/DLNA support be released?
All of my family's at-home video collection is on a NAS. Our TVs have hard-wired media streamers (Popcorn Hour) to display video on the TVs. Our Android tablets can play from the same NAS using MX Player and the ES Explorer file browser to select the file to be played — but using Mizuu seems like a better solution for our tablets when it will get native SMB/DLNA support. When will that be?
In addition to the home NAS, we have a wireless file server (Seagate Goflex Satellite) that we use in the car on road trips. We don't store video on the tablets themselves. Using it with MX Player and ES Explorer is basically the same as using the home NAS. In the future SMB/DLNA version, will we be able to have two separate databases? When we are at home, we only use the home NAS (and the Satellite is not even running). When we are on the road, we only use the Satellite (and the home NAS is not available). It would be nice to have Mizuu setup so that it has a "home" database and a "road" database. Will Mizuu have such ability?
I hope that this does not appear rude, but your answers will dictate whether I buy Mizuu today or buy a competing product similar to yours that already has SMB/DLNA support. Having spent some time on your website and reading your forum, as well as the skimpy website of the alternative, I am quite confident that you're the winner in the long run. I just need to know how long that I have to wait to get what I need. If you're days or a few weeks away from releasing 1.8, I'll wait on Mizuu.
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6:36 pm
August 1, 2012
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Michell Bak
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Post edited 6:40 pm - August 1, 2012 by Michell Bak
Hi!
First of all, it's pretty important to understand that DLNA and SMB support are two very different things. My primary focus right now is to add SMB support, and DLNA will quite possibly come further down the road.
SMB support is sort of hard to implement because there's really no guidelines on how to do it. You need to create an application that's capable of accessing SMB shares (that's the easy part), and also capable of acting as a local server to serve files on said shares (that's the hard part). All this kind of stuff is pretty new to me, as server programming has never really been of any interest to me, so it's taken time to understand.
I've been working together with someone else to develop the server part, and it seems to be working most of the time. It's a bit weird, I know, but it's something I'm working on and I'll hopefully be capable of finding the errors.
In all honesty, I can't give you an answer straight up on when it's coming. This sort of thing takes time. I was hoping for a release in July, but I've been quite busy with work in these past two months, so I haven't been able to do a July release.
So… If you need a solution today, feel free to go with something else – MovieBrowser, I'm guessing. I personally feel like Mizuu is ahead of MovieBrowser in many areas, but SMB support is obviously the biggest flaw right now.
I don't know if you've heard of the nightly builds. It's something I've been working on as a way to let users try the latest changes in a development environment (read: bugs). I'm hopeful that SMB support will be added to the nightly builds within a few weeks, so you're of course more than welcome to try that.
Another alternative would be to use CifsManager along with Mizuu. It requires root access, but if that's OK, then you can use it to bridge your Samba shares and make Mizuu think they're local files.
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7:32 pm
August 1, 2012
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SoonerLater
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Post edited 7:33 pm - August 1, 2012 by SoonerLater
My evaluation of Mizuu and its purported competitors is that Mizuu is superior to all of them in every way except one: SMB support. And since I don't store any media files on my tablets (using only SMB to access files on my home NAS and my Seagate Satellite), the ability to access files by SMB is a deal breaker for me.
I should have omitted reference to DLNA, as I don't use it anyway. SMB is all that I care about. All of my tablets are rooted, so I'll give CIFSManager a try. However, I did note your comment in another thread that using CIFSManager presents some risk of problems, but you did not specify what the potential problems were.
It's probably worth mentioning that you're on your own with CifsManager. It's known to cause issues sometimes. Also, it should probably be noted that you need to use different file sources for movies and TV shows.
Thread Link
Can you elaborate on the potential problems?
Since I'm not a programmer, I don't know how naive this statement might be, but isn't the SMB code that you need already public somewhere, and only needs to be copied and adapted?
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7:37 pm
August 1, 2012
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Michell Bak
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Post edited 7:39 pm - August 1, 2012 by Michell Bak
The issues with CifsManager is that it sometimes seem to report incorrect status of files on network shares. This can cause Mizuu to "hang" with very large libraries. Also, it doesn't work unless it's actually connected to a network - in those cases it should report that the files are unavailable, but it doesn't. You're of course welcome to try :-) Send me an e-mail if you need the installation file to try.
Regarding the SMB code, it's unfortunately not that easy. It's pretty easy to create a network file browser with login, but the hard part is the server part, and there's really not a lot of public code that can be copied there.
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9:07 pm
August 1, 2012
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SoonerLater
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The issues with CifsManager is that it sometimes seem to report incorrect status of files on network shares. This can cause Mizuu to "hang" with very large libraries. Also, it doesn't work unless it's actually connected to a network – in those cases it should report that the files are unavailable, but it doesn't.
I see that Play Store has other SMB clients, such as AndSMB, Network Places (Innocomm) and Fing Network Tools just for starters. I wonder if any other SMB client would be more reliable than CIFSManager.
FWIW… I have never had any problems with ES Explorer opening shares to my SMB servers. But then again, ES Explorer is only keeping that connection open long enough for me to browse what I already want to find anyway. I wonder if Mizuu needs the connection open for a such a long time (for Mizuu's own database building and maintenance operations) that this is the problem?
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9:14 pm
August 1, 2012
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Michell Bak
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Yes, there are some clients, but they don't do the same as CifsManager. CifsManager is - to my knowledge - the only application capable of bridging a network share.
Try with CifsManager - I'm sure it'll work, as long as you're connected to the network.
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