USB hard drive and video playback
 

Hi,
I am a new N800 owner. I use the MyBook to store movies and TV shows I have recorded on my PC. I use ORB to stream the media from my Desktop to my PocketPC and now my N800. This works well. So then I figured it would work better if I connect my MyBook directly to my N800. But the video play back is very choppy. It doesn't seem to matter what format, they all act the same. Sometimes it will be choppy for several minutes before it finally smooths out. All in all, it works terribly! I don't under stand why it works better streamed over the internet than connecting it directly to my N800. But if I copy a file from the MyBook to the MMC card in the N800 then it plays ok. I've tried different media players on the N800 and they all do they same thing. Is the N800 not able to play video files off of a external HDD? I really wish I could get this to work. And I don't want to have to copy stuff to the N800 first before playing. I want to play off of the Mybook. Any help would be great.

Paul

Re: USB hard drive and video playback
 

Just throwing out a theory here: It's possible that the Nokia is trying to index your whole external USB drive, and that this is continuing to go on while you're trying to watch a movie. If you connect the drive, then try and watch a movie from the MMC card does that go slow as well?

Re: USB hard drive and video playback
 

I had the same problem with a video on my thumb drive. I posted about it a long time ago, but no one really knew why. It seems that after some time, the tablet likes to shutdown the drive (In my experience). For the first 30 seconds, the access light is flashing, and the video is playing, then both just stop.

The tablet does not index the drive, it only explores it if you do so with the file manager.

Re: USB hard drive and video playback
 

Yeah. I don't think it's indexing. Seems more like a memory or buffering problem. Because if I let it go. It will sometimes smooth out after several minutes.

Re: USB hard drive and video playback
 

Does metalayer-crawler actually avoid indexing USB drives?

@paulm64: I'd still be interested if you'd try testing my idea.

Re: USB hard drive and video playback
 

Well, I plugged in the usb hdd and played a file from the mmc and it seemed to work fine. It stuttered only briefly a couple times.

Re: USB hard drive and video playback
 

while playing, open an xterm and type

"lsof | grep usb". The bar might be hard to find but it is on the symbols list somewhere.

It will list all applications that have a file opened on the USB.

metalayer-crawler WILL attempt to index it, but is faster after the first time.

Also "dmesg" might show something like using usb1.1 instead of usb 2.0 (you probably need a powered hub and it needs to be USB 2.0 - things will connect with usb1.1, but it will be slow).

Assuming there is nothing else interfering, an external hard disk should transfer as fast if not faster than the internal mmc cards.