Universal Media Server | Forum

Hello all,

I am new to the world of UMS. I am looking to build a server for my dad and archive his giant movie collection on it so he has an easier way to access his physical media. I have the server running on defaults and it streams great, even to multiple devices from a weak laptop while also playing on said laptop. However, I have a dilemma.

VLC on mobile keeps giving me a message that the content is unseekable. It looks like the content is being transcoded in the background. I am playing a .MP4 file. Subtitles seem to be enabled by default since the file happens to be in the folder. If I play it on an Xbox One with VLC, it seeks but has a bunch of video glitches and green screens until it clears up. What setting do I need to change to be able to have the media seekable without resorting to the jump to feature?

Playback devices will be iPhones, Androids, and Roku machines for now. Both iPhone and Android have a native VLC app.

Please let me know if you need any more information. Should I be using a different file format? I will be ripping his DVDs to the machine, so I can put them in as any file available if something is a better option. My test file just happens to be an .MP4.

you need to install mediainfo to seek.

on ubuntu, this would be:

sorry to bump an old post, but I'm having the same issue but don't understand how this fixes it. I have installed it, but don't know what to do now.

Being unable to seek while playing a video is a sign that it is being transcoded. Some devices use byte seeking to move to a different part of the video will not work with a transcoded steam as that part does not exist yet.

I don't use VLC myself but I believe it can support most formats so transcoding should be unnecessary and the video can be streamed instead.

To find out why your videos are being transcoded when they should not be I will need to see logs (see the section in red above).

One of the causes can be that mediainfo is missing which UMS uses to find out the format of the video. If it does not know what format the video is using UMS will just transcode it. This should be installed with UMS but sometimes on Linux systems it does not or is done separately.