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View Full Version : Multiple installations throughout the home network - presale question



bcslaam
10-17-2012, 12:24 PM
Hi I've just ditched tversity due to bad device support and currently trialling mezzmo. So much better program btw.

What works best for our home is to have multiple mezzmo installations. Is this possible from a license and functionality point of view?

I would rather not have one main server that has to be on all the time so as to conserve energy. Also, we upgrade various machines around the house at different times so the most powerful, capable machine will vary. Invaribly the more communal pc like the one in the living room next to the tv is one that has been superceded. eg mine is a p4 3.2ghz/4gb ram xp machine. When I talk to friends this is often the case for them to. Quite often the kids will have the latest pc with the most media on it in their rooms. But we are always telling them to turn it off to promote energy conservation etc and dont want to change that.

How many pc installations in a household does a $29 licence give you?

I notice that in testing my one office machine that my panasonic bdt220 just see's my mezzmo installation as "mezzmo" and doest specify what pc it's on. If I install mezzmo on each pc how is it addressed by the device as various machines are turned on and off during the day?

I like the idea that mezzmo is transparent and knows when or not other mezzmo servers are available and it all just clusters under the one name. Is this the case?

Regards
Ben

PS I did search the forum but stopped after 15min of not seeing anything on the subject.

JohnM
10-17-2012, 12:35 PM
I am certain that they will give you the official policy very quickly.
The license is per server. So if you want to run 3 servers you will need to get a license for each. (They may offer discounts, not sure).
Each server can have its own name, you can change it in the server settings screen.
Having various servers that appear and disappear randomly, I would find strange. Eventually I would want to watch a movie that was on a powered down machine.
You might want to give thought to your long term objectives. With me, I bought a NAS to store all the media on. Mezzmo runs on my machine. Normally I will leave it it on for others to use, but do shut down when it is idle if I need to. The mezzmo main screen has a status that shows what is being served to a device.

bcslaam
10-17-2012, 12:46 PM
Hi John thanks for a quick reply. Weirdly I just replied using quickreply and it dissappeared, does that happen for anyone else?

Anyway, what I asked was: So if your mezzmo machine is off then does that mean your device cant use media from the NAS that needs transcoding?

I like the idea of using a NAS if its really energy efficient. Some of the new ones appear to be along with a SSD or low energy HDD. Most of these have their own embedded mezzmo equivalent and I guess that would make mezzmo redundant, no?

It also means getting other members of the household to put stuff on the NAS constantly. And that ainst gonna happen. There will always be something that one of us wants to watch instantly that not on the NAS.

Paul
10-17-2012, 02:51 PM
Hi bcslaam,

Some answers:


One Mezzmo license can run on one computer at any one time. As JohnM points out, you can purchase multiple licenses for all your computers if you wish, but most people purchase one license and share their files & folders from their NAS drives & other computers on their home network to the one computer that has Mezzmo installed. Mezzmo can access & stream any file on your home network that is shared to the computer that has Mezzmo installed.
Each Mezzmo server that is running on your home network is uniquely identified so all your devices know about them correctly (even if they are called 'Mezzmo'). You can change teh name for each Mezzmo server to anything you like. By default they are called 'Mezzmo' but you can change the default name in the 'Media Server Settings' dialog in Mezzmo to something like 'Mezzmo (Study)', 'Mezzmo (John)', 'Mezzmo (Jane)', 'Music Hub', 'Movie Collection', etc.
Mezzmo can transcode & stream files on your NAS (provided it has permission to access the NAS). If a file on your NAS requires transcoding (since it is not compatible for the device you want to stream it to), then Mezzmo server will read the file from your NAS, transcode it to a compatible format and store the transcoded file on your computer (or a folder that you nominate in the 'Transcoding Settings' dialog in Mezzmo).
If each individual in your house has their own PC/laptop with their own files and does not really want to share them on a common NAS, then I'd suggest you convince them to either share their folders so one Mezzmo on one PC can access & stream them all, or it may make sense for a separate Mezzmo install for each person's PC that wants to stream their files.


Let us know if you have any further questions.

JohnM
10-17-2012, 04:56 PM
Yes bcslaam many of the NAS's available do have DLNA already on them. The model I am using is a Synology DS1511. It holds 5 disks and does have DLNA (both their own and Serviio I also see they had one from logitech). I did use them for a short time, but found they would really bog down. The box has an atom processor and limited ram. Even with transcoding turned off the box would take a long time to update the databases. Of course that might be because I have 5 -3TB WD AV drives installed along with an external 2TB drive. I currently have 1760 video files + ~17000 music files. All of my video is stored in a format that is supported natively by my devices so I don't need to transcode. That is because I run Mezzmo on my PC and serve up to 7 devices (not counting iPads and iPhones.) So why use Mezzmo? Simply because it hands down beats any other server when it comes to creating and maintaining playlists.

You will also quickly find that their support is truly a world class operation. As far as putting it on the NAS, the people here that tend to get the files all have a direct link mounted on their machine. It looks like they are saving it locally when it ends up on the server. The server can also be setup to automatically back up peoples systems. Since they are put in the folder that I added to Mezzmo, they automatically get added when someone looks at the folder or when I do maintenance. My system also acts like a DNS server, mail server. web and blog server yada yada. But the heart and most of the use are Mezzmo.

bcslaam
10-17-2012, 06:32 PM
Thanks for answers.

Maybe I should just install mezzmo on the machine next to the tv and just turn it on when we want to watch something on the bdt220 accross the network. Its a MCI Hetis Giga p4 3.2ghz HT/4gb ram 1GB onboard NIC. Do you think it would be a workable solution? ie fast enought to stream realtime?

I will test in the next couple of days. My experience with p4 playing an h.264 movie mp4 so far hasnt been good. But thats when you try and watch it on the pc. If I watch it on the panasonic player but mezzmo it from the p4 maybe it will perform acceptably. Time will tell...hopefully I'll get to test it before my trial period is up.

John do you have your mezzmo temporary file folder set to the NAS? How big?

I obviously dont want to have all the files in my house duplicated to this folder just for the sake of my blue ray player. Can it convert on demand and buffer to this folder?

Thanks again for your time.

PS My post dissappeared again usinng quickreply. Because my login had timed out and when it directed me back it had swallowed my post. Luckily I was prepared and copied to clipboard before. Paul IMHO the timeout time for login is way too short. I think it should be daily, not after 5mins. Not even enough to write a post really.

JohnM
10-18-2012, 02:08 AM
No my temporary folder is set at default on my local C: drive. I do not try to do real time transcoding as I have too many clients to support it and I like to be able to play my games :-)
The other reason I do not do do real time transcoding is that I do not want to use that much disk space. My video library is at 4.9TB obviously that would eat up a lot of room making copies.
So for my system, I transcode manually and only make the finished file available. Music we do transcode, but even that is pretty low usage as it only needs to transcode some of it to play on the tv.
If you set the transcoded/temp folder to point to the NAS then yes it can do it on demand. I do not know if your setup is fast enough for realtime, but the system does support pre-transcoding. Very
few machines can support real-time transcoding of HD content. The way I do it works well for me, but that is because I had standardized everything before jumping in.

Paul
10-18-2012, 11:00 AM
Hi bcslaam,

We'll look into the login timeout - thanks for alerting us to it.

As JohnM mentions, if any of your files are not natively supported by your DLNA devices, Mezzmo will transcode them on-the-fly. If your PC is not powerful enough to do this for real-time streaming, then I suggest pre-transcoding your files before streaming them. To pre-transcode a file, right-click on the file in Mezzmo and click 'Pre-transcode Files'. To pre-transcode a folder or playlist of files, right-click on the folder or playlist in Mezzmo and click 'Pre-transcode Playlist'.

You can set your transcoding folder (where all your transcoded files are placed) anywhere on your computer's hard disks or a network shared folder. Just remember, if the drive has slow access, then this can affect transcoding and streaming performance. Set the transcoding folder in the Transcoding Settings dialog in Mezzmo.