Thecus N5200Pro

[funkstar]

Originally Posted by gusi

Has anyone tried the ZN5200brPro with seagate's 1.5T disks?

The guide isn't very clear about their compatibility.

They aren't officially supported and not really recomended, though people are having a lot more success with them now the firmware on them has been sorted. They had a tendancy to either suffer from a lot of realocated sectors or drop from the array too easily. Basically, they are not inteded for RAID use so are not configured to meat the higher demands that imposes on them.

[flynn]

Originally Posted by flynn

Any other 5200 users experiencing this issue?

1. Open the SC web GUI
2. Expand the "Music Library", click on "Albums"
3. Set the view to "Small artwork" (bottom left hand corner in the default skin)
4. Pick one of the album art icons... one where you suspect that it's bigger than 200x200
5. Right click on that icon to get it's URL
(perhaps something like http://x.x.x.x:900x/music/1234/cover_50x50_o)
6. Access that URL in your browser
BUG: the image shown is not 50 x 50, as it's supposed to be


This bug wasn't really noticeable until I started using iPeng, where the size of the artwork sent to the client really matters in terms of memory usage. I imagine it's also affecting my Duet controller as well though, performance there is awful.

I've been having this issue with both the "resample" and "resize" artwork settings. If I enable artwork logging, I see something like this:

Slim::Web::Graphics::processCoverArtRequest (232)   The variable $actualContentType, which attempts to understand what image type the original file is, is set to image/jpeg
Slim::Web::Graphics::processCoverArtRequest (316)   got cover art image image/jpeg of 62036 bytes
Slim::Web::Graphics::processCoverArtRequest (593) Can't use GD for image/jpeg (music/1234/cover_50x50_o)
Slim::Web::Graphics::processCoverArtRequest (618)   caching result key: music/3217/cover_50x51_o, orig=...

Note the Can't use GD for image/jpeg.

Please chime in if you see the same kind of issue.

This issue is logged as bug 11765, and Andy @ slimdevices has made a comment there:

Whoever does the Thecus build needs to include GD.

Iletunic, you around? : )

[Markcu]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could please help?

I am attempting to get Slimcenter to run on my N7700.

I have the following Modules installed.

PERL 2.00.01
SYSUSER 2.00.02
SSHD 2.00.00
SQUEEZECENTER 7.3.2

I have managed to get it play internet radio fine, but when it comes to playing the RIPS of my CD's I dont get any output.

Checking the logs, I get the following:-

[09-04-12 22:54:07.2973] Slim::Player::Song:pen (341) Error: Couldn't create command line for wma playback for[file:///raid/data/Media/Music/cds/Moby/18/01%20We%20Are%20All%20Made%20of%20Stars.wma]

I'm sure it's just me, and I probably havn't configured something right, but I have no idea what it could be.

Many Thanks.

Mark.

[funkstar]

Is that WMA Lossless?

Unless Iletunic has modified the way the N5200 module handles WMA lossless, this isn't supported on non-Windows installations.

WMALossless isn't handled natively by any of the players, so needs to be transcoded by the server. This is handled by Windows Media Player conponents, obviously these are only available on Windows though.

This was changed recently, i think at 7.3 to facilitate the new streaming methods allowing for a vastly improved synced experience, including gapless syncing.

[Markcu]

Hi, Yes all my music is lossless wma.

thats a real blow,I thought the n7700 would have had the horsepower to be able deal with any conversions. Perhaps this isn't a horsepower issue.

Are there any plans to support this format? As if there was then this would be an ideal platform due to its speed and capacity.

As an aside, is FLAC supported, and if so is there an easy way to convert my WMA Lossless to FLAC and maintain all my folder structures?

Many Thanks.

Mark.

[funkstar]

No, it's not a horsepower issue at all, even a non-Pro N5200 probably has the power contranscode WMALossless to FLAC. The software that is used for the conversion simply isn't there or available on anything but windows.

Flac is supported by everything as is it streamed directly to the players without any conversion.

As for tools to convert, there are loads. I use dbPoweramp for all my ripping and converting, although i'm usually going from Flac to MP3. I would assume the batch converter would be able to read the WMAs, but I can't be 100%. Is there anything special about your folder structure? How is it layed out?

This is getting into non-thecus discussion though. perhaps a new thread would be a good idea? then others that have no knowledge of NAS boxes is more likely to chip in as well

[Daryle Tilroe]

Originally Posted by funkstar

They aren't officially supported and not really recomended, though people are having a lot more success with them now the firmware on them has been sorted. They had a tendancy to either suffer from a lot of realocated sectors or drop from the array too easily. Basically, they are not inteded for RAID use so are not configured to meat the higher demands that imposes on them.

I'd classify this as basically FUD, particularly with the new firmware. The drives don't know they are in a RAID array. Anyhow I have *two* N5200Pro's that ran fine with the 1.5TB ST31500341AS and the *old* firmware for months. I upgraded both (10 drives in total) to SD1A and they have also run fine since then, over 4000 hours on one and ~4500 on the other.

I think some of the problems people had were in configuring them for power saving and to spin down. I usually disable such features and certainly would do so in a RAID/server setup.

From my understanding there were some lemons with constantly increasing reallocated sector counts. On mine 6 are 100% clean and 4 had some right off the bat while the raid arrays were built. On a drive this dense I don't find a few dozen reallocated sectors a worry unless they are increasing. Right now on the array I can look at 3 are clean and the other two have the 2 and 31 reallocated blocks they had 5 months ago.

[funkstar]

Originally Posted by Daryle Tilroe

I'd classify this as basically FUD, particularly with the new firmware. The drives don't know they are in a RAID array. Anyhow I have *two* N5200Pro's that ran fine with the 1.5TB ST31500341AS and the *old* firmware for months. I upgraded both (10 drives in total) to SD1A and they have also run fine since then, over 4000 hours on one and ~4500 on the other.

Well this is from reading the Thecus support forums on Hexus.net.

Of course the drives don't know theya re in a RAID, and that is part of the problem. If the drive encounters an unrecoverable error, they can drop off the RAID array as they are suspended for up to 30 seconds. This is normal for a non-raid drive. The RAID certified ones will return to being operational within 8 second, preventing a perfectly good drive from being removed from the array.

Since the new firmware was released by Seagate, the number of people asking (and complaining) about them has decreased significantly, so I would say you are probably right, they are fine to use now.

And yes, there were a number of lemons early on.

[iletunic]

Originally Posted by flynn

This issue is logged as bug 11765, and Andy @ slimdevices has made a comment there:



Iletunic, you around? : )

I will fix this properly in the next release. GD is included with the current module, but the jpeg support was not compiled into the gd C library.

You can download this and replace the relevant files inside the module:

http://www.letunic.com/temp/gd.tgz

files to replace are in SQUEEZECENTER/system/CPAN

the 'auto' directory inside CPAN is actually a symbolic link to "arch/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/". If you're accessing the files over Samba, you might see 'auto' as a regular file, so just use the other directory ("arch/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/").

Also, remove the artwork cache dir from SlimCache, so that proper thumbnails can be regenerated.

[flynn]

Originally Posted by iletunic

I will fix this properly in the next release. GD is included with the current module, but the jpeg support was not compiled into the gd C library.

You can download this and replace the relevant files inside the module:

http://www.letunic.com/temp/gd.tgz

files to replace are in SQUEEZECENTER/system/CPAN

the 'auto' directory inside CPAN is actually a symbolic link to "arch/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/". If you're accessing the files over Samba, you might see 'auto' as a regular file, so just use the other directory ("arch/5.8.8/i686-linux-thread-multi/auto/").

Also, remove the artwork cache dir from SlimCache, so that proper thumbnails can be regenerated.

This patch works for me - thanks!