Winding and rewinding

Hello!

I have a few suggestions in the topic fast forwarding or rewinding movies. At now it is really a mess. With some movies it does not work at all, with others it works somehow, but is not really fast. I guess the reason for this is in the DLNA standard or the implementation of it on the TV side (I own a Philips 85xx series model).
On my Netgear Eva 8000 mediaplayer the navigation in a movie works really great. There are at least 4 speed levels for winding and rewinding an a really great feature: if you press a number button on the remote, the movie jumps to the number x 10% of the movie, e.g. with a press on 5 you can jump in the middle (50%) of the movie.
I don't know, if such a feature is possible over DLNA, but I am afraid, that the answer is no. (If it would be possible, someone surely would have built it already.)
But - and this would be a really nice feature of mezzmo - what, if you could control the positioning of the movie on the server (mezzmo)? You already show the status of the currently streamed video. I think it would be possible to implement control functions as well. So you could navigate in the movie on server side. I always have the notebook by my side when watching movies, and with remote desktop I have access to the server. So this would be a really greate compromise for the missing feature on DLNA side.

So, what do You think? Is this possible?

Hello,

Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately if we control the position in the movie on the server side, the client side will most likely fail playback, since it'll be requesting a specific position from us (the server) and we'll be delivering something else to it.

That's bad news. :-( One last idea: what about setting the starting position in the movie on the server as a (non persistent) property? Then, if the TV starts the playback, the server could report the remaining length to the TV and start streaming at the defined position. This is not an elegant solution, but a workaround with a great benefit. Now it is almost impossible to stop viewing a movie and next time to start watching it from the last position.

Yes, such a trick could work for some formats, but if information about the video/audio layout is stored in the beginning of the file, the device would fail to play it back, since we wouldn't be sending it those bytes in that trick mode.

Ok, I understand. Then let's hope for a new and better version of the DLNA standard in the hopefully not too far future. No matter, Mezzmo is a great piece of software. Keep up the good work and thanks for the great support!

I did look into the ff/rew problems on my Sony BDP players. They were all hit or miss when trying to control my movies. I discovered that (in my case) my movies were all vob files from dvds. The problem was that the original dvd did not maintain the timing internal for the entire movie. This is not a problem for a dvd player because they don't use the signal. But the Sony BDP does use it for ff/rew. So I bought an application VideoRedo Plus. It allows me to fix the time signal for the movie. It also converts from a vob to mpg. Takes a few minutes per movie and has fixed all of them to work correctly. Your mileage may vary so try it before you buy it.