Twonky Forum

Just tried out Twonky Mobile, and found it interesting that it tries to save a playlist to "the library". I'm not quite sure I understand the ideas here ... I'd be curious to understand if that means that once the playlist is saved and the renderer isn't by tablet (android), I can then turn the tablet off and the server will continue to push the content of the playlist to the renderer ? ... and if so, which part would own responsibility for "randomizing" the playlist ?

Anyway, those are all questions for another forum, I guess.

The question relating to Twonky server is, my 4.4.4 server running on a Linkstation Mini did apparently not accept the request for saving a playlist - Twonky Mobile stated that it wasn't successful at trying to save "to the library". Is this server side saving of playlists a capability that came in a more recent version ?

Server-side playlist support wasn't added until TS 5.0.

- Rick

Thanks for the follow-up, Rick.

I would very much appreciate if someone could point me at a set of instructions for manually upgrading a Linkstation Mini (the older version thereof, unfortunately - LS-WSGL/R1) to Twonky v5 or above.

Of course, I'd prefer a "standard" installation package, but I don't think there is one - or was I too blind to find it ?

Last weekend, I gave it a quick try with an install package meant for the Linkstation Pro and actually got it to run, but then saw that the entire twonky setup had ended up in a different location (path). So I went back to the earlier version (4.4.4, or now 4.4.8, after a firware upgrade to the "final" version for this model).

Sadly I'm not very technical and know little about NAS. Here are some instructions someone posted a while back. I don't know if they still work. I would NOT recommend trying to upgrade unless your very tech savvy, or can find an expert to help you. You might want to make a post in the NAS section of this forum to see if there is someone there who can help.

The "admin" account is different from "root". Search for "terastation root access" or similar.

If you want or need to install it manually you need to do this:

- Get system level access to the NAS (ssh or telnet)

- Locate the Twonky installation directory on the NAS (often something like /usr/local/TwonkyVision...).

- Rename the original installation directory (e.g. append something like "_org")

- Create a new folder named as the original installation directory and place the 6.x files there.

- You might need to edit the startup script that launches Twonky (usually located in the folder in /etc/init.d/) and append the "-appdata" switch to the command line. Using the -appdata command line property, you can tell the 6.x servers where to place all runtime generated files. On most NAS devices you need to specify that to prevent Twonky from writing to the ram disc.

Rick

Thanks, Rick; from what you described, I feel comfortable about proceeding. I have already enabled and made use of root access to the Linkstation via telnet. I think there's two more things that I'll need to know to get going:

1) Are all the changes from v4 to v5 or v6 restricted / constrained to the "twonky" folder ? I.e., the start/stop script in /etc/init.d and other components remain as before, with no changes needed other than the -appdata switch / command line option?

2) Where can I find a zip package (or for that matter, anything that isn't fully packaged up in a Windows .EXE that I can't extract the files from) with the v5 or v6 binaries for the ARM processor in the Linkstation Mini (first version, LS-WSGL/R1) ?

1. I'm not sure about the answer to your first question. If no one answers here in a day or two, you may want to repost it in the NAS section.

2. You can find all of the NAS builds here. http://www.twonkyforum.com/downloads/6.0.38/

- Rick

Thanks again, Rick.

After some searching and reading and experimenting, I finally got there - almost, a few remaining glitches are still to be sorted out. The upgraded licenses I purchased today isn't accepted (will wait for a response from support) and the trial license declared itself expired pretty much right away.

The most tricky part was finding binaries that would run on the particular Linux version of my LS-WSGL/R1 Linkstation Mini. I ended up using the "generic" package for ARM, little endian, but that gave a library error when starting the daemon. So I ended up replacing the server binaries with those from the package for the LS PRO, having used ldd to determine which libraries would be needed for which version.

Instead of using the -appdata switch, I decided to use -inifile; it worked, and I find it's easy to read and grasp.

Instead of using the -appdata switch, I decided to use -inifile; it worked, and I find it's easy to read and grasp.

You must use the -appdata option on most NAS devices. This option allows you to relocate all the Twonky configuration and database files into a directory that will survive a reboot. The default location for these files is the /var directory, most NAS devices recreate this directory when rebooted and most use a RAM filesystem or small disk partition for /var. This means that either or both-
1) Your configuration and database will be wiped out after a reboot.
2) You will crash your NAS because the /var directory becomes completely full.

A side comment on the -inifile option-
I don't believe this option has worked on NAS devices since the 5.x versions. At least that is when I recall switching to using the -appdata option.

Thanks for pointing out the importance of using the -appdata switch; I've now added that to the startup file.

So, finally, after a license glitch that got resolved today with the help of Twonky support, I'm finding that saving a playlist from Twonky Mobile to the 6.0.38 version of Twonkyserver still doesn't work.

Based on Rick's statement: "Server-side playlist support wasn't added until TS 5.0.", I had assumed it should work now. Was that assumption ok to make ?

If so - is there possibly a file system level permission issue to look into ?
Where would the server try and save the playlist ?

Or what else might get in the way ?

Apart from that - playlists created manually are working fine now, and so are ratings. Great !!
Next weekend, I'll look into creating some first view files.
A question about that - is there a collection available to leverage from ?

I was very pleased to see that one that I thought I'd need to create is already included: "most recently added" ("zuletzt hinzugefügt").