NASLite Network Attached Storage

First, I am very happy and impressed with the small size, light system requirements and overall operation of NASLite-M2. Thanks to Tony and Ralph for an elegant and affordable solution. A friend of mine purchased my copy as a gift after I installed NASLite 1.x and subsequently upgraded his system to NASLite 2 as a thank you for all of my work. I feel like I got the better end of the deal.

I am running my NASLite on an old AMD K6/2 500 MHz system with good results. I do need to replace my NIC with a chipset other than the RTL-8139B (I've had problems in the past with less-than-optimal throughput with the "8139too" driver on other Linux distros) and will eventually replace it with an Intel PRO, but I went with what I had for now.

Now, to the question(s): I have read reference to video streaming using DAAP but so far, have been unable to see any videos in the iTunes "SHARED" list. All mp3s I put in my Disk-0 drive appear after indexing. I am also able to add .mov, .mp4 and .mpg in my local iTunes folder or add them from any other folder on my Mac or my external drives hooked to my Mac or shared through AFP or SMB on the network, but DAAP doesn't seem to index them. Am I missing something? Is this a limitation of iTunes or do I need to edit the "PLAYLIST" file on my NAS disks to add this to my shares? Also with FrontRow, I can add any video file to my Movies folder and it will appear in the list, but if I could use DAAP to recognize and index them, they would automatically appear in "Sources" tree in FrontRow. That would eliminate the problem I have now with FrontRow hanging forever when I scroll between missing movies (for instance, when I don't have an external drive connected) and iTunes exclamation marks coming up as well. I'd also like to know if anyone has had issues with Windows XP 64 bit edition being unable to browse the workgroup after installing their NASLite box. This has happened to me twice and the only solution was to shut down my Mac, Windows and NASLite machines and reboot the router, reboot the NASLite box, then boot up the rest. The XP/64 machine was giving me an error that it couldn't find the workgroup. Running the "troubleshooting" wizard said the computer name I had assigned to my x64 machine was already in use (but it's in fact, unique to that computer).

Thanks again.

Scroll all the way to the end of your Shared list, most video files will not have ID tags and not be classifiable and will appear at the end.

My girlfriend is using Vista64 and accessing the M2 beta just fine via the SMB share daemon. I have no issues with my Vista32 either.

Mike

Update: I reindexed my MEDIA folder and the video files (mp4, m4v, mov) now show in my DAAP shares, but they are treated as audio files. When I play them in iTunes, I get audio only. These files play fine in my local iTunes library on my Mac. I haven't checked iTunes on Windows yet. I'll install it tonight and try. Also, Front Row refuses to play them. Says it is unable to play that file type. The files in question also play fine in Front Row from my local library.

Update 2: I just installed iTunes on my Windows partition (MacBook Pro w/bootcamp) and DAAP video shares won't play at all--mp3 plays fine. I get exclamation point on videos in list. Ex. point appears after I select another file.

First,

OS X version
iTunes version
Front Row version

Second,

iTunes exhibits odd behavior with video, at least 8.0.2, double click the video file, then double click the album art window and the video window will appear.
Also, iTunes will ask for a password, which is another odd behavior, user admin and the password is the name of your NASLite-M2 box.

Regarding video in iTunes, I am not sure that happens in all versions, only 8.0.2. I'm installing it in windows right now to see if it's the same.

Also, what video file types are you trying to play?

If it's a non standard format that you've installed a quicktime plugin for, the DAAPD daemon needs to be able to send the mime type of the file, it's unaware of the file type, iTunes will not know how to deal with it.

OS X 10.5.6
iTunes 8.0.2
Front Row 1.0
Perian 1.3.3 (for XviD AVI wrapped in MOV qtref file -- iTunes and Front Row handle these locally without issue)

Windows XP SP2 (Bootcamp Partition)
iTunes 8.0.2.20
Quicktime 7.5.5

The DAAPD daemon is currently unaware of XviD, there fore it doesn't send the mime type needed for playback.
We'll review the mime types for the next release, and see if XviD will work across a DAAP stream.

video files I have tried are m4v, mp4 and mov. I also tried XviD/mp3 AVI with a mov refererence file created with Quicktime Pro, which play fine in local ITunes folder. All play audio only in iTunes and are listed as "Media Kind - Music" in iTunes "info dialog. 2 of the files (m4v) are podcasts from National Geographic Wild Chronicles but do not appear in my podcast folder in Front Row (Front Row says "There are no podcasts in this library". They do, however, appear in the podcast playlist in "SHARED" in iTunes". I have my podcast videos in a folder called "podcasts" in the MEDIA folder on Disk-1. I'm using Disk-0 as both boot and data with Disk-1 as a second data drive. Not using RAID.

This still doesn't explain why m4v, mp4, and mov files (all quicktime) refuse to play the video portion. It wouldn't be an issue if it were only XviD. I could have figured that much out. But since I have the XviD encoded files in a quicktime reference wrapper, wouldn't that stream them with the QT mime type letting QT and Perian handle the decoding? It certainly fools iTunes into playing them. In fact, it is the only way to currently import XviD/DivX into iTunes. Or am I missing something?

Also, I am not as worried about WIndows and DAAP as I am Mac. And XviD aside, if I can't get quicktime movies to stream, DAAP isn't doing me much good for video in Front Row/iTunes.

Please reread all that I've posted. I explained to you already about the only audio and no video portion.

Sorry, I forgot to mention: I have no album artwork pane, nor can I select one. Grid and cover flow options are greyed out. I only have list available with no artwork pane. When I select "get album artwork" I am met with a login dialog alerting me that I have to log in to area "webserver" on [my IP address], which, of course, fails with any user or password (or no pass) I enter. Forget XviD. I'm only talking about QT mp4 now.

Sorry, it's late. I'm trying the user/password you suggested.

Sorry, guess I've been using iTunes for so long I made an assumption, and didn't mention how to turn it on.

Bottom left hand corner, there's 4 icons, it's the one that looks like a triangle for the now playing pane.