Is it possible to share an attached usb drive over network from the hdr-fox?

BenB

Member
I was wondering if the hdr-fox could be configured to share the contents of an attached usb drive for other devices on the network to access?
I'm setting up a few raspberry Pi units around the house but Samba seems unreliable on the pi and I read here somewhere about the Hummy systems using samba.
Would be great if it could! The Pi's never have a problem seeing the hummy on the network. Also, is there any way it could allow ff and rw of files that are being streamed from the hdr-fox? At the moment the pi can play files but not fast forward through them. Even having a file on pause earlier made it glitchy when I resumed (just being able to play them on other tvs is cool though!)
 
Sharing the HDR-FOX by Samba does make attached drives available at the same level as "My Video",

If Samba doesn't work for you, you could try NFS.

I access my HDR content using a HD-FOX, and share by network mount rather than DLNA share because I get full transport control and file management (move, delete..). However, because the network share bypasses the decryption of a DLNA stream this only works with decrypted content, so I run unencrypt to decrypt recordings by routine.
 
Cheers BH, I didn't realise it would work like that! I plugged my USB into the hummy this morning and sure enough the Pi can see and play the video! Though for some reason I can't get the ts files to play, this same Pi was working yesterday!!

Annoyingly the same problem arises as streaming tv recordings - you can't pause, rewind or fast-forward without glitching the playback. There i was hoping that SMB would somehow allow this as uPnP wouldn't!
 
Now you are down to the media player. With a network share you are no longer restricted to DLNA clients, the player has full random access. If *bmc can't cope how about VLC?
 
Thanks for your help! it seems the TV recordings from the Hummy only work if streamed via uPnP, otherwise, using SMB they get a 'Failed to play' message. Files on the attached USB drive on the other hand, work best on SMB!! Weird, but at least I've got it working. VLC Handles everything fine, and movies (SMB sctreamed) have the ability to FF&RW (Actually slightly sketchy, but jumping 10 mins using the up and down arrows on XBMC works) however the uPnP stream of recordings gets very confused, it doesn't know how long the video file is, in fact the time starts at thinking it's only a few seconds long and increases as play continues. Pausing however makes a right mess, overlapping audio etc! Tried advanced settings to increase memory available but didn't help
 
it seems the TV recordings from the Hummy only work if streamed via uPnP, otherwise, using SMB they get a 'Failed to play' message.
This sounds like the files have not been decrypted. Does the green 'Dec' icon appear against them in the WebIf file browser?
 
Strange, I thought I had it set to decrypt on the fly. Could you please remind me how to set that, I its been a while!
I've got auto-unprotect installed, I thought that was the same
 
Aha, I've installed Mediatomb, and unencrypt. in the past I think I did have mediatomb installed, but uninstalled it as I'd never had a need for it!!

How to I set about unencrypting my whole library? I'm excited to see if SMB sharing of the files will help them behave better on the Pi!
 
OK, I manually decrupted one file, made the connection from the Pi as SMB, and played the decrypted file. I dont;w know why but it takes forever to load compared to the more primitive uPnP connection.
And most importantly the same glitches occur if you interupt the stream by pausing, or trying to fast-forward or rewind. Shame
 
Right, got it working! Didn't realise that I had to not only install unencrypt, but also enable it on every subfolder (in the Opt menu of each folder)
Now the files play much better! They arrive on the Pi with their true time showing, and behave just like video files do during playback! On xbmx the FF is a bit weird anyway, but stepping through by 30 seconds, or 5 minutes is fine)
I was going through the hassle of setting up mediatomb, but realised that SMB connection played back finee, so not bothering with MT.
(BTW, what is the point in MediaTomb if the hummy shares it's content anyway? Surely it's actually les good, as its database needs to be refreshed etc in order to give an updateed reading of your recordings)
 
The HD-FOX doesn't have native server capability, and neither did the early firmware versions for HDR-FOX. Hence Mediatomb.

However, you are using WebIF Auto-decrypt, not unencrypt. You don't need both.

To use unencrypt you have to initialise it by running unencryptsetup via Telnet, and also either keep the Humax running between the hours of 1am and 6am or adjust the cron setting so it runs any time. To use Auto-decrypt all you have to do is mark the folders you want to decrypt the content in (including any new content that arrives). You don't need to decrypt everything, just put the things you want to share into a Decrypt folder.

PS: sorry, I've updated the reference I gave you earlier to include the unencryptsetup requirement - see Package Notes in the Wiki for more info.
 
Ah, so the option was there all along!! I won't bother with the Telnet version! Is there any way of stopping it from saving the original into a different folder? Or is that only for any I've manually unencrypted - it appears so)
 
That's one-off decrypts only, and acts as a safety net. If you want a safety net in general, install undelete.
 
Awesome, thanks as always! Being able to play all my recordings from any TV in my house is pretty cool! I did think it wasn't possible til I found out it was because they were still encrypted!
 
Something to remember: you will not be able to decrypt manually or automatically until the DLNA indexer has done its job, and it can get a bit behind the times (sometimes) - so if you are wondering why a .ts you can see by network share won't play it's probably because the systems hasn't got around to it yet.

The icons in the WebIF browser give the clue: until the DLNA symbol is present a recording cannot be scheduled for decryption; if the Enc symbol is present it cannot be decrypted (Enc = protected, HiDef only); when it has been decrypted the Dec symbol says so.
 
Once these things are set to be as as default though, will the Unprotection and Unencryption run after every fresh recording?
 
Only once the DLNA database has caught up with the new entries - can take a while.
In my experience it's pretty instantaneous with later firmwares. Very occasionally one can get missed for some reason and then it is only added to the database on the next boot (as the DLNA indexer scans the entire disk at boot).

It's also not uncommon to end up with a corrupt DLNA database which can be fixed through Web Interface->Diagnostics->DLNA Server.
 
I had a file still not indexed this morning from yesterday - wondered why it wouldn't play (across the network)!
 
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