Enough is enough

[Down2Earth]

Okay Dead Eye....guess my theory did hit a snafu.. your unit FAB number doesn't outline what I thought would help. Which made me curious, so I did check my motherboard and I have the same exact numbers CV200, version V1.5 and Date :20170511 on it as you do. So we have the same hardware version in speaking.

I did not have to cut the connectors RTV off, the two grey antenna wires that are gold soldered to the board, I did not want to mess with having to redo those, I just lifted the board up enough to see the version with a flashlight. I did have to put a straight pin to the 'reset' hole to get back up and initialized, seemed to have been at a stall booting back up or maybe I was just impatient. While I was in there I cleaned out my fan... thanks for the insight in doing so, real easy do so with your instructions.

[Dead Eye]

No problems D2E. I used to do board level repair back in the day and I couldn't believe that different vendor supplied parts that matched specifications from the originals would yield different behavior in the operations of the boards we repaired. Quality of materials, tolerances between vendors being critical...now everything is black boxed and made by automation.

That sticker info might be the 'final assembly' date?

[lamster]

I have'nt had time to look at my DMS yet but I will.


I see we are still waiting for some kind of input from the powers that be, Im guessing that they have seen this thread with recent postings in other threads, but nothing in this one

Just do the right thing and tell us one way or the other if our issues are actually going to get looked at, and if they will be fixed, all WE WANT is some honest answers be it good or bad.


Please dont ignore us or our issues, Just give us some straight answers to our questions.


Not holding my breath tho

[Dead Eye]

I have thought for some time now that perhaps the DMS development team is under staffed and overworked...I know that sounds clicheish but cliches always have some grain of truth to them. I know that I have opined on this before but I'll say it again...why hasn't there been an update to the OS itself in all this time. Android is open source so it isn't like they are paying a license fee for each unit. My other Android streamer started out with 5.1.1 like this one but has since gone to Android 7, that smoothed out a lot of little problems that I was noticing. The lack of progress on the OS side of this unit confirms...at least to my mind...that the development team is barely able to address posted problems and SDK development let alone be working on a test bed unit with a new OS. Any one remember when Ting promised an Android 7 update.

Over the span of the three years that I have had mine I have watched posts from users who are running the same SDKs' but have different results and outcomes from their units. If all things being equal at the hardware level this shouldn't be...but it is. This has led me to wonder about any data contract the the FAB team has with the online resource that this unit is hard coded to use to extract data from and any subsequent parsing of that info into the correct fields and tables in the database. This could be a source of problems...just saying!

Overall though I still like this unit, I just don't care about the poster wall and I use the '.nomedia' file trick to exclude every directory on the internal drive except the 'Movies' folder. I do have a lot of respect for the users that seek out correctness of their media and how it is presented to them using 'The Poster Wall'.

[tbrown25]

Dead Eye:

I have often thought the same thing. At times, it seems as though the DVDFAB team does not have any resources dedicated to the media server at all. It sometimes seems they "share" a limited set of development resources between multiple projects and the MS gets very little of that shared resource.

Sometimes I wish they would make the system "open source". If the code were public, perhaps someone out in the world could work on it.

[Dead Eye]

Couldn't agree more tbrown25!

The concept of this hardware is sound and well integrated into FABs' main software product...which is excellent btw. You would think that they would put more resources to task in maintaining and improving this product and take heart in the fact that users press them on problems, express frustrations yet keep it.

On an unrelated item though I purchased the 'Enlarger.AI' module and was very pleased with the output on a documentary that I bought. The video was 1 hour 40 min long and it took a little over 8 hours to upscale but I was very happy with the end result. It was pressed at 480p and up scaled to 1080p...worked like a charm!

[lamster]

Still nothing from the people on the top table


A product is only as good as the customer support they say!!!!!!!!


Silence in this thread..............Says everything.

[DaveH50]

IMHO, the scraper issues seem to be mostly fixed. I have 3036 movies on an internal 10TB drive and a USB3 external 10TB drive, and whenever I add new movies to either one DMS correctly identifies them in the poster wall. However I note that a bunch of poster movies don't show any closed captions, despite having copied the ISO with the CC files. I have hearing loss in one ear, plus my wife is always chatting on her phone next to me, so CC is quite useful. Often if I go to the video folder and play the movie from there, it'll find the CC info and play it.

But I agree the DMS team seems rather unresponsive since early this year. Maybe the staff is reduced due to COVID-19?

[Mona]

For the "streaming over NAS for UHD" issue, need to check and make sure that the connected TV device support 4K playback; and is it a gigabit network? A 100-megabit network may cause lag issue.

Regarding the HD audio "serious buffering problems", need to make sure that it is set to passthrough to the receiver and the receiver should supports those HD audios.

[JimS]

For the "streaming over NAS for UHD" issue, need to check and make sure that the connected TV device support 4K playback; and is it a gigabit network? A 100-megabit network may cause lag issue.

Regarding the HD audio "serious buffering problems", need to make sure that it is set to passthrough to the receiver and the receiver should supports those HD audios.

Hi Mona, Thank you for addressing this issue. For most of us here, we've long since checked out all of the solutions you've offered. The TVs are 4K, the connection is gigabit, passthrough is enabled on our receivers. As has been documented for over the last 3 years, the problem seems to be within the hardware or firmware of the DMS. Several of us have since purchased other media servers (Zappiti for example) and all of the above features work (in my case, flawlessly). Mine is also android based. That would seem to indicate that our home theater equipment has the correct settings and is capable. When I connect my receiver to a NUC computer, your own DVDFab Player also works flawlessly through the NAS. This DMS is the only DVDFab product that I am disappointed in (and I own most of them for Windows and MAC). It would be great to hear definitively that the problem can't be fixed...or that someone is at least working to fix it. Thanks for your time.

P.S. Just in case you see my signature, yes, I did update to the latest firmware option and still the same results.

[lamster]

Hi Mona, Thank you for addressing this issue. For most of us here, we've long since checked out all of the solutions you've offered. The TVs are 4K, the connection is gigabit, passthrough is enabled on our receivers. As has been documented for over the last 3 years, the problem seems to be within the hardware or firmware of the DMS. Several of us have since purchased other media servers (Zappiti for example) and all of the above features work (in my case, flawlessly). Mine is also android based. That would seem to indicate that our home theater equipment has the correct settings and is capable. When I connect my receiver to a NUC computer, your own DVDFab Player also works flawlessly through the NAS. This DMS is the only DVDFab product that I am disappointed in (and I own most of them for Windows and MAC). It would be great to hear definitively that the problem can't be fixed...or that someone is at least working to fix it. Thanks for your time.

P.S. Just in case you see my signature, yes, I did update to the latest firmware option and still the same results.

Great reply that Jim, I somehow feel that they dont actually understand the issue here with the reply above


When you look at dvdfab for instance that gets updates frequently, I am honestly starting to think that either they are loosing interest in the DMS because it cant be fixed, or that they dont actually write the firmware for it and whoever its 'farmed' out too do it, dont want to support it anymore as they are on doing newer products.

We all know what player the DMS is based on and reboxed in their own cradle, So I expect thats the issue here.............A1 ring any bells.


Android 7 was promised and said to be well into development, Thats at least 18 months ago, so the chances of UHD over NAS actually getting to the working stage is a bit of a dream.

[JimS]

Great reply that Jim, I somehow feel that they dont actually understand the issue here with the reply above

When you look at dvdfab for instance that gets updates frequently, I am honestly starting to think that either they are loosing interest in the DMS because it cant be fixed, or that they dont actually write the firmware for it and whoever its 'farmed' out too do it, dont want to support it anymore as they are on doing newer products.

We all know what player the DMS is based on and reboxed in their own cradle, So I expect thats the issue here.............A1 ring any bells.

Android 7 was promised and said to be well into development, Thats at least 18 months ago, so the chances of UHD over NAS actually getting to the working stage is a bit of a dream.

Thanks Lamster, I also tried a few other possible solutions for the DMS. I had been using an older xFinity modem/router (3.0 compatible). I've recently upgraded to their newest modem/router (3.1 compatible) and still no joy with our DMS. I didn't do it for this reason, but I also recently upgraded all my ethernet wiring from Cat5 to Cat6. I thought maybe the better signal throughput through Cat6 would make a difference with the DMS, but alas...no. This DMS has simply become something of project for me now as I don't include it as part of my overall Home Theater set up. Right now, I let the kids use it for their Disney etc. movies. I have a 10TB drive in it so the kids don't need to connect to the server to watch their stuff. I'll still pull it out every time there's an update just to see...but not holding my breath.

[JimS]

lamster, sorry if I've been misspelling your name. Does it begin with a small "L" or a capital "I" [eye]?

[lamster]

lamster, sorry if I've been misspelling your name. Does it begin with a small "L" or a capital "I" [eye]?

Small "L" Jim, But dont worry about it, ive been called worse

[JimS]

Hi to all who have been suffering with the UHD buffering problems since the inception of this DMS. Below, please find the only response I've ever received to our request. It arrived just a couple of days ago. If you care to send in a log concerning this situation, I would not hold your breath waiting for results. But at least, they've acknowledged that they can't duplicate the problem. That is enough for me to believe that unless they update the DMS to a more recent android version, our desire to use our NAS servers as our media streaming device is futile. For those who can afford to, there are other companies who can meet those needs.

.................................................. .................................................. ..............
Mona and I
08-19-2020, 03:27 AM
UHD playback issue on Movie Server
Hello Jim,

The QA team told me that they cannot duplicate the issue, hope that you can repeat it and then send us the latest log file, they will check again, thanks again.

Regards,
Mona