The VideoLAN Forums

I have VLC on my ipad and the mediatomb (DLNA server) on my Raspberry PI. Everything works fine: from the ipad I can access the MediaTomb server, browse files, watch movies, but thumbnails do not show up in VLC, file's icons show up in VLC as empty boxes.

In mediatomb, I selected <ffmpegthumbnailer enabled="yes">, which I hoped would cause thumbnails to be genrated on the fly and show up in VLC, but it does not work.

- Does VLC for IOS supports thumbnail via DLNA protocol?
- Has anybody succesfully managed to use mediatomb thumbnails?

Thanks
Fabio

Hey Fabio!

Yep, thumbnails are generally supported by VLC. However, those have been sufficiently tested only with PLEX and Twonky. I didn't try mediatomb yet, but I will!

Thanks Felix. Would be great to hear about your experience with it. I was not familiar with the other 2 apps you mentioned, I will have a look. I have simple needs, so I am mostly looking for a lightweight server with thumbnails. Any strong selling point you want to mention? How about minidlna, what do you think (I read that I have to create thumbnails manually, but that may be ok)?

No, I don't have strong opinions on any UPnP server. Twonky was pre-installed on my NAS and auto-generates thumbnails, so that's kind of cool. It can also do transcoding of some files, if needed. For PLEX, we support it because this what quite a few people use. For minidlna, I heard about it, but never came around to actually try it in person.
Generally speaking, I wouldn't use a UPnP media server which requires manual thumbnail creation, because this is something a server should do for me. It is tedious to do that for a large collection of media and easy to automate, so why not have software do it for you. However, those are just personal opinions and preferences

I did not consider twonky for the moment, as it is not free. I tried instead Plex. On the good side, it works great. It beautifully organize the library and download metadata for movies. Very powerful. And thumbnails work just fine. On the bad side, it is not open source and it listen on a scary number of ports (see below) on which I have no control. I recognize port 1900 for dlna,and port 32400 for the web interface. All the rest is mysterious. It also try to listen on couple of ports on the wan!!! I am blocking everything from the firewall, of course. I do not block outgoing connections to the wan, otherwise the metadata retrieval won't work, which is a risk I take. it would be nice to have more visibility on what it does internally. I am considering analyzing traffic...

Back to this thread about mediatomb: it is simpler and more transparent (open source), which is nice, but still no luck with thumbnails . Hope somebody can figure that out.

Just curious on this topic, I've seen the same behavior with whatever software the Seagate Wireless Plus is running, assuming it is not one of the aforementioned. Any chance VLC will generate thumbnails for those or the like?