Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

General discussion about the media server. Feature requests. Hints, tips and tricks.
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Twonky_Rick
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Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by Twonky_Rick » Tue Jul 20, 2010 6:45 pm

You asked for it. You got it. I'm pleased to announce that an updated Users' Guide is now available for TwonkyServer 6.0.

Special thanks to Jim Pfeifer and Kevin Cooper for their work on this. Thanks also to Angela Scheller, who wrote the initial TwonkyServer documentation.

- Rick
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PeeBee
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by PeeBee » Tue Jul 20, 2010 8:06 pm

Hi Rick

Thanks for posting this and also thanks to those who put it together as it is a comprehensive guide to the User Interface but...

(there's always a but!)

...there's so much more to getting Twonky set up correctly. There are many settings that are no longer exposed to the UI such as setting the content base folder, setting the server to only bind to specific network interfaces instead of all that it finds etc - these are only available by modifying the ini file directly or via the RPC interface. People on this forum have been crying out for a comprehensive guide to all of the ini file parameters.

Transcoding is glossed over as being made available by the application/server provider or not. Nothing about how end users can set things up themselves for Windows/Mac/Linux installations. Not everyone buys Twonky pre-installed on a media server/NAS - we pay separately for the product and then struggle to set it up to do what it should be able to do out of the box. Now if it was free to use unsupported then we could understand Twonky's view but it's not.

Nothing about Remote Access either.

Apologies for sounding ungrateful - this is a good start but only a start. I eagerly await Part 2, Part 3 etc covering the above and other settings.

PB
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by Twonky_Rick » Tue Jul 20, 2010 9:50 pm

Thanks for all of these suggestions. I'll forward all of these to our writers and we'll try to address some of this in our next updates.

As far as remote access, the Flash-based remote access interface that is visible in TS 6.0 today isn't an officially supported feature. It will be officially added in TS 6.1. Expect new documentation at that time.

- Rick
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by mgillespie » Wed Jul 21, 2010 7:54 am

I would agree that ContentBase needs exposing to the web interface and documenting if possible, it's a comonly used feature. I suspect the reason it's not exposed is for the commercial NAS products, they don't want end-users fiddling with it and exposing other parts of the OS filesystem to the server. (that would be my guess).
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by edrikk » Wed Jul 21, 2010 4:47 pm

Thanks Rick.
Will updated Tree documentation also be provided?
Will the updated Tree documentation (or even this document) list the video/audio/image tag name to Twonky metadata mapping?

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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by sirgeek » Thu Jul 22, 2010 7:24 pm

I too want to know how to enable transcoding of video. I have a powerful enough machine that should have enought throughput to translate things on the fly for me.

Will there be something explaining HOW to enable these features ? (How would an OEM enable the features, do they have some special documentation) ?

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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by Twonky_Rick » Fri Jul 23, 2010 7:42 pm

edrikk wrote:Thanks Rick.
Will updated Tree documentation also be provided?
Will the updated Tree documentation (or even this document) list the video/audio/image tag name to Twonky metadata mapping?
There are no plans to add more tree editing info to the Users' Guide posted here. There is some info on this topic in the forum already (if you can't locate it let me know), but it's not 100% accurate. I tried to get it updated, but so far the team has been too busy. The long term solution to this problem with be a new tree editor app, but we don't have a release date for that yet. Some work was started, but it unfortunately had to be put on hold.

- Rick
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Twonky_Rick
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Location:San Diego
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by Twonky_Rick » Fri Jul 23, 2010 7:45 pm

sirgeek wrote:I too want to know how to enable transcoding of video. I have a powerful enough machine that should have enought throughput to translate things on the fly for me.

Will there be something explaining HOW to enable these features ? (How would an OEM enable the features, do they have some special documentation) ?
We realize this needs to be improved and plans are in place to improve our transcoding, however I don't know yet if these will benefit both PC and NAS users. I'll try to post more on this as we get closer to a release.

- Rick
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by Wires » Tue Oct 26, 2010 4:07 pm

For the PC transcoding, if I turn on the video transcoding, does it do it for all video formats, or just the ones that the client cannot process natively.

IE: If I turn on MP4 transcoding, and I'm streaming an AVI file to a PS3 (which accepts AVI), will Twonky still transcode it to MP4 first, or just pass it through as an AVI?

I cannot find any information on this.

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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by steamhead » Tue Jan 11, 2011 11:10 am

TMM_Product_Manager wrote:
edrikk wrote:Thanks Rick.
Will updated Tree documentation also be provided?
Will the updated Tree documentation (or even this document) list the video/audio/image tag name to Twonky metadata mapping?
There are no plans to add more tree editing info to the Users' Guide posted here. There is some info on this topic in the forum already (if you can't locate it let me know), but it's not 100% accurate. I tried to get it updated, but so far the team has been too busy. The long term solution to this problem with be a new tree editor app, but we don't have a release date for that yet. Some work was started, but it unfortunately had to be put on hold.

- Rick
Hi Rick,
I'd appreciate a pointer to the latest, however inaccurate version of the Tree documentation. I got some trees working just how I liked them for 5x, but now I've gone to 6x they don't work at all, yet the syntax looks fairly close.
Cheers
Dean

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amunoz_tico
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by amunoz_tico » Fri Jan 14, 2011 1:13 am

Here I posted some information about the Transcoding Architecture. It could be useful for everyone.

http://www.twonkyforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9157


I hope that Twonky's Team can help us to enrich the info.

Regards!
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steamhead
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Re: Where to find TwonkyServer 6.0 Documentation?

Post by steamhead » Mon Feb 07, 2011 9:16 pm

Still waiting for a pointer to the most up to date version of the tree documentation.

I find it crazy, given how powerful a feature it appears to be, that it seems to be being kept a big secret. If the editor feature is on hold, give us some documentation. It won't necessarily suit everyone, or be polished, but there's a fairly capable bunch on here that would be able to get on with it, and then help others with samples of how to get things done.

Remember that for somebody to put their hand in their pocket and BUY a media server product, they probably have a fairly large media collection, since there are many quite capable free options out there that can simply serve up the media in a rudimentary organisation.

Once you get to a large collection you are going to want a more personal way of chopping up your collection to be able to quickly get to the things you want. This is why you get requests for being able to code multiple artists against one file, or handle more tag types, so they can make the media server work FOR them to get to exactly what they want, not AGAINST them as it seems sometimes. I've got some fairly good trees working for me, but there are still things that are a puzzle that a little documentation would work wonders for.

I'm even tempted to offer to help get the thing up to date and more palatable for an end user if somebody can give me the basics and answer some questions along the way - if that's the only way to make some progress here.

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