Universal Media Server | Forum

Hi all, I've done my best to search these forums (and google) for existing guides on transcoding settings, but haven't been able to find anything yet. I'm just hoping to find a guide that goes through all the relevant settings, mainly FFmpeg and tsMuxeR, and making sure my PC is being utilized properly for encoding, because it seems like it isn't when enabling GPU acceleration and encoding acceleration methods.

For context, I'm trying to stream older shows and music videos to PS3 -> component -> 20" CRT, so these are actually pretty small files, 480p or so, and yet they are often stuttering badly. Since i'm anticipating dealing with many different file formats, I'm just trying to learn more about all these engines and which formats/codecs prefer which engines and if I can change UMS settings or increase PC acceleration to kind of brute-force as a generalized solution to give the PS3 what it wants without a bunch of stuttering.

I'm also trying to investigate network performance and make sure I know enough to separate that from encoding issues. UMS is running on my pc with a wired connection, but the PS3 is connected over wifi. As I've been experimenting with UMS settings, I've started seeing the DLNA 2104 error more often, and I can't tell whether it's wifi signal loss or UMS server issues. I've seen a few discussions here about opening ports, so I might try to look more into that to see if that helps with preventing the disconnects.

If anybody has any advice or has a particular guide they prefer, general or targeted that would be applicable, I'd really appreciate it!

Nearly every setting has a tooltip to say what it does and there is more detailed information in the UMS.conf in the installation folder
(this one is not used to store your settings but is copied to your systems configuration folder on installation)

For general usage you can refer to the Knowledge base.

For renderer settings you can refer to the DefaultRenderer.conf

If you want FFmpeg settings then you will have to refer to the FFmpeg documentation but it is unlikely you will need this as UMS will handle the command line unless there is something specific you need it to do.

For old videos the PS3 should be able to play them natively depending on what format they use so should not need to be transcoded.
I cannot say exactly why its not working for you as many factors could cause issues.

Stuttering might just be a poor network speed which is forcing UMS to transcode those videos at an even lower quality to have a chance of being playable.
Ideally you should have a wired connection to the PS3 unless there is a direct line of sight to the router for Wifi.

You don't need to open any ports, that is only for accessing UMS from outside the local network. You just need a firewall rule for UMS but this is added on installation.

To be of any help I would need to see your logs of what is happing when you play these videos. See the link in my sig.

thanks for the reply! I'll take a look at these links and reconsider running a wired connection after all!