Mezzmo on Windows Server 2008 Home based - Multiple Users?

Hi I'm playing around with the trial of Mezzmo and so far so good. The deal breaker for me is multiple users. I have a server running Windows Server 2008, from this i want to run an instance of Mezzmo which multiple users can then access on their laptops/mobiles etc to access their customised databases. This would only be used in the house.

Would i have to setup usernames and passwords on the windows server to do this? - Obviously these would match the windows pc names.

What software is best to use for andorid /iphones etc to access the music/movie/picture databases?

thanks in advice for any help! :)

Yes, Mezzmo supports multiple users. You'd need to create a username/password for each and they could then login into the 2008 server and access their own copy of Mezzmo with their own library. You'd then have multiple servers running (one for each user) which would present their own library.

There are a few solutions for Android/iOS devices - check out some threads on our forum here to see what others are using. I think the best solutions are third-party, as they support more formats natively and thus require less transcoding on the server side.

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Originally Posted by Dennis

Yes, Mezzmo supports multiple users. You'd need to create a username/password for each and they could then login into the 2008 server and access their own copy of Mezzmo with their own library. You'd then have multiple servers running (one for each user) which would present their own library.

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This is the most confusing thing about Mezzmo. I did a trial using one account and everything worked great. I was going to buy it right away and then decided to try multiple users. This is where things gone out of hands.

1. Scenario where there are many computers on the network with SINGLE user on each running one server is clear enough - user has personal library, service is installed under distinct name and clients can see all these servers on the network.

2. In real families computers are often shared. Furthermore, if there is dedicated file server in a house it does not make any sense to access media on it through Mezzimo servers running on private computers. What makes perfect sense though is running Mezzimo on file server, where most of the media files are stored.

3. It is possible to run Mezzimo from two separate accounts and create personalized libraries. However only ONE service is running, serving library from the account it is tied to. This is extremely confusing because user logged into second account can see "service running" and access its settings, even though it is actually service tied to first account. Editing library from second account doesn't do anything to actual served content.

4. If second account "changes" service it in fact creates another service instance in windows. But they could not be started simultaneously because they use same port. It is OK on separate computers, but does not work on one. Should we assign different ports? This makes setup much more complicated for non-technical users, and the best selling point of mezzmo is out-of-the-box simplicity.

5. Several server instances have temporary / transcoding directories and other settings. What if their users add same files to their libraries? Like 1 TB of videos. Those will be transcoded as many times as there are users, flooding HD with unnecessary files.

Like I said in my thread "Buzzkill" there is definitely something wrong with this multiple instances concept. Servers are simply not written like that.

My comments above aside here is an answer to OP.

Are you sure you need DLNA server? If all you need is to access media from laptops and mobiles Windows servers are perfectly capable of streaming by themselves. You just have to install and configure Windows Media Services. I am not sure if that will give you DLNA though, but for that some people were able to install Windows Media Connect 2.0 (which is server version of WMP) on 2008 server.

In my home I am using windows box as kind of highly configurable RAID NAS. But since I have huge variety of clients I needed good DLNA with transcoding. I spent some time evaluating DLNA servers and Mezzmo seems to be the best at this time. Unfortunately for some reason it was designed to run on multiple personal computers contributing to common media pool rather than standalone server delivering personalized content.

So, in your case, if your potential users (I assume your family) are old enough to be trusted with administrative account on your server, you can create just ONE new user and share its password with everybody. Then each user can use playlists to create their customized content, while all will be sharing same library. The DLNA devices like TVs will be able to access everything.

With multiple users on the same PC, there'll be multiple instances of the Mezzmo server registered and running on that PC. Each will have its own port, so they'll all work happily together. At least, that's the design of it. I've replied to the other post about why we chose this route.

Having one "master" account does not allow one to set forlder permissions (e.g. for adult content), since everyone can access all files. It's not suitable for everyone ;)

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Originally Posted by Dennis

Having one "master" account does not allow one to set forlder permissions (e.g. for adult content), since everyone can access all files. It's not suitable for everyone ;)

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In order to run Mezzmo GUI user MUST have an administrative account (at least I wasn't able to make it work under limited). How exactly does that prevent them from seeing everything on the computer? :confused:
I too would be replying on the other post...

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Originally Posted by wwwoholic

In order to run Mezzmo GUI user MUST have an administrative account (at least I wasn't able to make it work under limited). How exactly does that prevent them from seeing everything on the computer? :confused:

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That should only happen on Windows XP - Vista and later Windows versions do not require Mezzmo to be run as an admin, but we'll check this here again.

It is XP indeed. I wonder how it is on windows servers, because that is what OP is using.

Ok, then it makes sense :)

even if it does make sense it does not solve the problem of protecting files for multiple users on XP :p