Need help with Transcoding feature of Twonky 8.4.x

General discussion about the media server. Feature requests. Hints, tips and tricks.
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davy
Posts:4
Joined:Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:08 am
AV Hardware:QNAP TS-212
Need help with Transcoding feature of Twonky 8.4.x

Post by davy » Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:25 am

Hi all,

been running Twonky for years but never got into the transcoding specifics, it just worked. But now that QNAP has stopped supporting Twonky I went thru the process of installing/configuring the ARM package manually, and licensing v8. The server runs and is accessible thru the default port.

However, after the media scan completed I see that my QNAP's CPU is 100% loaded, and 'top' on Linux shows, that ffmpeg is using up all those resources.
So a couple of questions:

1) Is this related to initial thumbnail/cache generation of Twonky, and how long does it take? Having thumbs is nice, but I don't want this to take forever or load my NAS that heavily for an awful amount of time.
2) Can it be disabled/configured? Didn't find such controls in settings, although it seems it might've been available in previous versions

Thanks
Davy

davy
Posts:4
Joined:Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:08 am
AV Hardware:QNAP TS-212

Re: Need help with Transcoding feature of Twonky 8.4.x

Post by davy » Wed Jun 14, 2017 10:14 am

Couple of updates...

Further investigating this issue I found that indeed ffmpeg was creating thumbnails forever, given the qnap processing power isnt that huge.
Some mitigation was possible by specifying a smaller resolution size of the created thumbs, but it was still too heavy of a load for me.
So I decided to migrate from the TS-212 to a TS-253A, and what can I say, hell of a difference.

The problem however is that on the TS-212 (x19 ARM) and the TS-253A (x86_64) the behaviour of Twonky Server seems different:
While on the TS-212 ffmpeg was always running and creating thumbs, on the TS-253A ffmpeg is not starting at all. As a result, now, on the TS-253A no thumbs are showing up when checking in the webUI, unless artwork is embedded into the media container (e.g. an MP4 file).

I suspect that the startup-scripts of each platform package are taking different decisions, but I am not certain how to find out.
Anyone out there who can help, pretty please?

davy
Posts:4
Joined:Sat Jun 10, 2017 11:08 am
AV Hardware:QNAP TS-212

Re: Need help with Transcoding feature of Twonky 8.4.x

Post by davy » Wed Jun 14, 2017 5:25 pm

My issue was resolved by uninstalling the twonky qpkg and then manually deleting all twonky related files (noticed that there were some ARM x19 leftover entries/files) and cache databases. After a fresh install of the x86_64 qpkg and reconfiguration and a couple of hours waiting, all thumbs now show up correctly - instantly on the webUI, and with some small delays from other devices/clients. Yay!

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