DLNA, Droid-X, and wasted time…

Ok here are my experiences so far getting a DLNA server to transcode to the DroidX:
I have tried nearly every UP&P/DLNA server out there on virtually every platform (Mac, Linux, Windows).

Observations so far:

I’ve put up about 12 different DLNA server/platform combinations, so far there isn’t one that does everything I want. Mezzmo is the closest, but it still doesn’t have a few features I really crave.

Windows is the slowest at transcoding everything. So my current recommendation is to run in Linux or Mac (Linux is quickest so far)

The droid-x processor only supports MP4 natively (maybe wmv or some other format that I will not use, but MP4 as far as I’m concerned). That is the only format that will spool from a DLNA server to the phone.

Problem is that the phone requires the MP4 files to have specific data at the beginning of the file (lookup MP4 ATOMs for more detail). Well it seems that the information for some of the required ATOMs cannot be calculated until the file is converted to MP4 (it is also possible the FFMPEG could but just does not create these up front, since almost everyone uses FFMPEG for transcoding…). Most of the media servers will stream you a MP4 file that does not require transcoding. And most of the media servers will transcode the MP4 files into whatever format your other devices like. So it appears that your best convergence option is to re-encode (and take the quality hit) your video as MP4 so your phone can view it natively, then let your media server transcode for all the other systems (XBOX/TV/DVR/PS3/etc…). Note if you are using handbrake to convert, I have to set the file to enable streaming to get the phone to play it.

Other than that I’m off to my next level of convergence… The phone captures in .3gp I have one media server on a Linux VM (twonky I believe) that supports DLNA uploads. So I can seamlessly upload video to the server. Unfortunately I haven’t found one of the DLNA servers that will transcode the .3gp files… It would be really nice if I could simply DLNA copy videos and pics from my phone to the DLNA server then have them instantly available via transcode on the other DLNA clients around the house…

Anybody else have a DLNA that supports uploads or .3gp transcode?

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