I've got lots of DVDs ripped to MKV format via handbrake, and these are on a USB hard drive. I've plugged the hard drive into my wifi router's USB port, and the router has samba and DNLA enabled.

 

I've installed VLC on iPad and iPhone, and it detects the drive, and I can browse to the folder where the films are, but only a to D show up. If I browse the file via Windows, they all show up so they are definitely there.

 

What's going on?

Had a similar issue a couple if yrs ago but only the first block showed up via pc.

It was due to the router not being able to display the amount of info in the drive - fat32 drive formatting only, and as such only 32gig showed up.

I partitioned it down to max 30gig blocks and everything showed up. 

Could be something similar?

When you say browse the drive, do you mean as a network share, or with a DLNA enabled application?  Try '8player lite' on your iPhone and see if that works.

 

Could it be that the DLNA client hasn't finished indexing all the files on the drive yet?

Dlna is a real pita. I used it on my Samsung tv for a while and it did work but took me ages of footering to get it working on the correct profile for transcoding etc. 

 

For the iphone/iPad I'd recommend just using an app that plays directly off the file share rather than dnla. OPlayer is excellent and whilst not free is very reasonable (I think there is an oplayer lite so you can try it). 

Edited 19 March, 20179 yr by gullyg

I use 8player on the ipad that works with my servers.

8 player also just shows the films a to d. 

2 hours ago, 2SkodaFamily said:

8 player also just shows the films a to d. 

 

Don't know what's going on there then  - perhaps the version of DLNA running isn't fully compatible with Apple?  What happens if you rename the files all with a 01 prefix?  I have no problem with a Twonky server or plex with 8 player (apart from the fact you it doesn't like the dolby sound encoding.)

Edited 25 March, 20179 yr by io1901