First, thank you for the pointers on moving the data .db files out of their installation default folders. Although the instructions weren't exactly right, I was able to muddle my way through once I had the folder locations and .ini/.txt file names. Since these are unencrypted flat files, I would love to see these configurable thruough the UI.

1. Tagging and Compilations

I previously used Twonky. With Twonky, I was able to store albums (music) that had various artists in the artist tag in a "Compilations" (user-configurable folder) directory that prevented the content indexer from indexing artists names and thus introducing a library or playlist problem in which many artists are listed whom only are credited on one or two tracks on an album. I have the "Part of a Compilation" tag switch set in all the files, and it appears as though Mezzmo does not respect this. Is there a way to either tag the audio files in such a way that Mezzmo does not index the artists in albums of my choosing, or some other way to tell Mezzmo to ignore the artists in these files?

2. Indexing speed

Mezzmo indexes really slow (about 17 hours to index all of my content after install, ~1TB) and seems to get slower and slower as the time elapsed gets longer. It does successfully index - eventually. Are there any tricks to improve speed?

3. Indexing updates/changes to content

Mezzmo does not seem to "watch" content folders for changes and update upon a change. I have to force an update.

4. Apparent hanging when re-indexing content

If I make a change to a folder/tag, and force a manual update to see the change, the system seems to hang on "Finalizing...". although the task eventually completes. During execution the computer and Mezzmo become unresponsive. JFYI, it is an older Athlon II x64 (2.1 GHz) with 2GB of RAM - it should be sufficient for this purpose. I will be updating it this weekend to newer hardware, to avail myself of transcoding features, so we'll see then.

5. Video Metadata

I (gleefully) noticed that in some cases .mkv files (which by definition do not have metadata embedded in them) were/are showing some metadata. I use MyMovies to catalog my video files. Where is Mezzmo getting the metadata, and how can I populate this for all files?

6. Transcoding

Is there a way to force Mezzmo to delete transcoded content after a period of time? It would be great if as part of a scheduled maintenance I could have Mezzmo delete all temporary/transcoded content on a weekly (et al) basis to save disk space.

7. Grouping

I know that is rather vague, but what I would like to do is group by artists in such a way that allows me to pick ABC, DEF, GHI, etc... and then select from Artist names in the sub group, then album, then play album in track order from the tag, not by filename. Is this possible? I have music from over 900 artists. I know I am an edge case, but it would still be a huge improvement!

8. WD TV Live

I would like to only display the "Video" tree when in the Video menu option, "Music" in the "Music" option, etc... and to not show the top of the heirarchy where I must select either Video, Music, or Photos after having selected one of the three in the WD TV Live menu. Twonky does this, so the WD must request the content group.

9. Run service as local system or network service

I was able to modify the service on Windows by manually changing it in administrative tools, and it seemed to function as expected (given that I had migrated all of the databases out of the user folders) running under "LOCAL SYSTEM". Is there a plan to change this structure/design in the future? It should be a relatively easy mod (if the code uses variables for these things, like directories and such), and here's why - like many users that use extensive whole home DLNA solutions, the media server is essentially a lights out installation that sits in a closet somewhere, is only accessed remotely (remote desktop) and may or may not even have a monitor attached to it. My server sits in a closet, and only has a single user configured on it. It is not common to configure services to run as a local user - protocol suggests using a built-in account for this.

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Just to throw it out there, I tested the following DLNA servers fairly extensively, and Mezzmo has absolutely won out over them all:

1. Twonky 7.05
2. Serviio
3. Wild Media Server
4. iSedora
5. J. River
6. TVersity
7. TVMOBiLi

and of course, Mezzmo.

Many of my must-haves came from requirements fulfilled by Twonky 6.x and earlier, and a new requirement, transcoding .mkv (without a lot of messing around with .desc files and such) which it does not, at least not without more head-scratching and futzing than I care to indulge in.

1. Speed on clients
2. Customizable "playlists" or "media tress" presented to clients
3. Extesive use of tags and artwork presented to various clients (haven't fully tested this one yet, but it meets my expectations thus far)
4. ability to index ~100,000 .mp3 files and up to 1TB of total content without slowing down display to clients.
5. Excellent UI/UX
6. .mkv, .flac, and .mp3 support
7. Transcoding. This was my biggest motivation for moving to another server product (and the reason I am upgrading hardware on the server to support it).

TIA,
--H