Twonky Forum

Hi,

first of all: This is in no way a rant!
TMS 5.1 seems to be pretty much unusable for most users (at least if one reads the TMS 5.1 thread in this forum).
For me personally not having fixed the issues of my Roku Soundbridge not finding TMS and having all pictures shown with garbled date and time stamps on my PS3 makes version 5.1 a complete no-go.

I still see 4.4.18 (which I use for a long time now) as the last really stable and full-featured version of TMS that has been released so far, so I'm interested when 5.1.1 will come out?

Any date set already?

- ThyMaster

Hi Thymaster,

I totally agree.
I understand that with the release of 5.1 the "Berlin" office has met their deadline, Bonus anyone.
But it should be clear to all parties involved that the release is unusable on any but the windows run boxes. All NAS implementations are useless. Either PV should step out of that niche or deliver something useable.
In essence since last year none of the major tagging bugs of twonky 4 have been tackled and the 5 release is useless in it's current implementation for NAS/low cpu/ energy users.

I'm sticking with 4 and not part with money for this. Meanwhile I'll vote with my feet/wallet....

I understand that with the release of 5.1 the "Berlin" office has met their deadline, Bonus anyone.

that was also my feeling. The last 5.1 RC came out, quite a couple of complains like ROKU not working ... and it got released.
Hopefully they really fix it and keep the NAS (un)supported. A couple of months ago I bought a license key for testing the 5.x versions on my LS Pro. Now I'm still using 4.4.6/18. I really start wondering if this testing was a complete waste of time and money.

Georg wrote:

I understand that with the release of 5.1 the "Berlin" office has met their deadline, Bonus anyone.

that was also my feeling. The last 5.1 RC came out, quite a couple of complains like ROKU not working ... and it got released.

That's not how it happened at all. Check the forum thread. Roku problems were reported, they were tested in the Berlin office, and no problems were found, requests for more info were ignored.

The other point worth remembering is that you can get a very skewed view on the relability of a product if you only look at support forums.

I for one and running several installations of 5.1 (ARM Sheevaplug and Win32) and both performing perfectly on my system. it's performing much better than 5,0 and even better than 4,x.

mgillespie, twonky-christian, whole Berlin office: Don't take it as an offense. In general I really appreciate the work you do. But in my eyes the release of 5.1 looks like one to meet a deadline. Especially after rereading the forum.
Sure, you are right. When ThyMaster wrote about the non working Roku in RC6 I didn't dare testing that version. Then twonky-christian wrote on Monday 7th, that they'd tested it and their Roku worked. Reading that I decided to test the next day, but when I wanted to report back version 5.1 was already published.
I don't think that Berlin seriously can expect a feedback within a single day from volunteer testers that have their jobs, family other hobbies etc, etc. That Roku issue is only a single point that we now picked out. If you compare the RC6 feedback and 5.1 release feedback it really would helped to go through (at least) another loop - if we focus at product quality.

mgillespie wrote: Roku problems were reported, they were tested in the Berlin office, and no problems were found, requests for more info were ignored.

Wait a minute:
What means ignored? For my part I never ignored any request, but Berlin just released 5.1 w/o further notice.
Actually I was the first to report bugs on RC6 and I spent a lot of time doing so.
I tried a lot of workarounds (I'm with TMS since version 1.x) but no avail.

I share the feelings that 5.1 was released on pressure but not on real bug fixing....
I mean the guys at Twonky Media ask us to test and then they plain ignore our reports and release a buggy so-called final version????

Well, I shouldn't get too hot under my collar but 5.1 for now is the biggest disappointment with TMS so far (and by far!).

- ThyMaster

I'm not sure there ever will be a stable 5 twonky that does what it says. After a year of waiting I'm no further than I was. What galls me most is that they had a 4 release with composer working june last year. I've got a techsupport reply stating this.

I'm on the unsupported list hence up the proverbial creek. I'm hoping the QNAPS crowd has some leverage as twonky is build into their firmware. Sadly their response yesterday (sic) was less than hopefull

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=177&t=19037

by QNAPJason on Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:14 am
Hi,
Twonky 5's transcoding ability is just the interface part.
It still requires QNAP engineers' effort to complete the transcoding section in the actual coding.
Moreover, we're still waiting for a stable release from Twonky currently before .
This is why we still have not released Twony 5.
Afer we've received a stable release from Twonky, then we can start checking the possibility of transcoding some files such as FLAC & MKV.

Jason

My point is that I'm not a nagging computer ignoramous, Twonky 5.1 is useless, and not just in my opinion.

I'll leave it at that. Twonky/PV is a business either they want the market share or not. This way they alienate their supporters and word of mouth/keyboard advertisement. That strikes me as bad business.

self install NAS is frought with pitfalls that end-users fall into. This is why they are unsupported, there is simply too much "hacking" required to get the server installed.

Considering that TwonkyMedia has about 80% of the DLNA/UPnP server marketshare, and OEM devices don't seem to have too many problems, it is clear that most problems are user induced.

I have several 5.1 servers running, including NAS-like devices, and have no problems whatsoever, 5.1 is a huge improvement over 5,0 series and puts it on-par with 4.4x for reliability and scalability, it beats 4.x series on features.

I'll bite,

I've installed/hacked twonky 4 on many a linux NAS, including the wlhdd2.5 ASUS one and the readynas with 0 problems.

But I guess you're right twonky 5 is stable and wonderfull, just not in my hands
Lucky for PV that I'm the only one

For anyone looking for alternatives, here's a nice overview:
http://oss.linn.co.uk/trac/wiki/MediaServers

Ref. recent comment "...OEM devices don't seem to have too many problems...". So far as I can find out, none of Twonky's OEM customers yet support TwonkyMedia Server 5.1. Does anyone know of a 5.1 OEM?

Hi

I love the functionality of the 5.0.68 build I'm using and I'm sorry to say this, but I have to agree; in a significant number of absolutely key areas, 5.1 is nowhere near as finished as 5.0.68.

From a music only users stance, one of the main USP's that makes Twonky great has is that you can use it on a Linux NAS; if you're using WHS NAS, then you'd likely just use something like Asset UPnP which does have user configurable music trees built into it. I can see that the self installation builds are costly to maintain, but PV should at least have made a few of the few more common NAS ones functional (D-Link and ReadyNAS being the two really obvious ones, but there'll no doubt be a few others). I'm not proposing that they be supported; all I'm saying is that the main self-installation installation packages (particularly for NAS's that wont ever come with Twonky 5 bundled into the firmware) should be made to basically work. That includes moving the cache, temp and database directories somewhere safe!

I'm not yet convinced that the scanner's working correctly in 5.1 either; even when I did get it to start scanning the media share first, it swiftly crashed. My guess is that it found the non-media files and tried to scan them (but that's just a guess).

As to the vendor supplied versions, even if 5.1 is taken up by NAS vendors like Qnap, the issue then is that you can't add your own music trees so it becomes much less attractive than Twonky 4 was. If people like Qnap do bundle 5 with their firmware updates, I can see a few people being pretty disappointed when they find that little snag out! This issue could all be got round by there being a custom tree upload facility (in the Netgear build that super-poussin has made, this is by making an accessible new share with the views directory included) but there should really be another way to do this - something like upload (and delete everything) buttons in the Twonky interface - such that when vendor installed versions are made available, there is at least some way for (non technical) customers to install more useful trees.

Before any of that can be considered though, the other issue with 5.1 is that it seems to have problems with additional music trees as we currently understand them; the previous 5.1beta trees I tried just didn’t work with this latest build. Yet another issue is that even if the trees can be made to work (and they probably can with some fiddling), the UPnP sort order is broken so you can't arrange the menu's in a logical layout; that is a real shame and as far as I am concerned, that is one of the very next things should be fixed.

5.1 might well scan quicker and have a smaller database (which are massive achievements; well done PV) and I’d really love to benefit from these great developments as soon as possible, but until these other things are sorted out, it's of little use to people like me (with large music collections and thus needing custom music trees with things like the album artist tag available). The people who have tried the s-p build with my custom tree seem to really like the new navigation features; it's a shame that a wider customer base cannot enjoy these great new capabilities that Twonky 5 can provide when used with more complex custom trees.

Bri