Problems with music on network drive (1 Viewer)

[mrceolla]

Hello,

I have a single seat installation with all media except my music on local drives. My music is on a network drive (m:\). This is the drive that I added to MediaPortals music folders. The regular MP gui can access everything just fine but both ampdroid and webmediaportal are having difficulties. Both can read the music database but both fail to stream (access denied) and ampdroid fails to download or browse the share. I tried running the service as my login account but that changed nothing.

Is this expected behavior? Would I have any better luck using a UNC path in MediaPortal folders instead of a mapped drive?

 

[mrceolla]

I should add everything else seems to be working pretty well so far. Excellent work.

 

[Oxan]

You should configure the service to run as a local user account that does have access to the network shares. Start > 'Services' > find the MPExtended Service > right click and set the user account on the Log On As... tab.

Using UNC paths might help too, indeed.

 

[mrceolla]

Hi Oxan,

Thank you for your reply. As I tried to describe in my OP, I did try to setup the service to run as the local logon user who does have access to this mapped drive but the results remained the same.

I can try a UNC path but SHOULD this work with a mapped drive?

Thanks.

 

[Oxan]

It should work with a mapped drive but in my experience it doesn't. That's a bug indeed, but one for which I don't know the cause yet.

That's (unfortunately) more or less true for all network-drive related problems at the moment: the current code should work in all cases, but it doesn't and I have no idea why. From experience I know some things which work/don't work, but it's a bit of guess work.

 

[ollienator]

It should work with a mapped drive but in my experience it doesn't. That's a bug indeed, but one for which I don't know the cause yet.

That's (unfortunately) more or less true for all network-drive related problems at the moment: the current code should work in all cases, but it doesn't and I have no idea why. From experience I know some things which work/don't work, but it's a bit of guess work.

one idea for the server side would be keeping a list of drive mappings e.g. m:\ => \\server\music\, v:\ => \\server\videos\, etc. and replacing the drive letters in the database with the unc mapping in the service.

 

[Oxan]

Except that when the mapped drives don't work, it's because in the context we run Windows thinks they aren't mapped, so we can't load the list of mapped drives either.

 

[ollienator]

sorry, i should have reread before posting. what i meant was: use the configurator to define and store the mappings in the desktop context in the xml settings, then use String.Replace(mappedDrive, uncPath) using the settings file in the service to access the files.

 

[Oxan]

That might work indeed. Thanks.

 

[mrceolla]

Hi folks,

Thank you for the attention to this issue. I don't NEED to access my music on the mapped drive via ampdroid or webmediaportal at this point in time. I use Zina (a php program) for that right now. Since that is the case, should I hold out, keeping my current config (mapped drive instead of UNC), and hope that it suddenly starts working in a future release of MPExtended? Or are mapped drives a dead end? I'm hesitant to make the change from mapped drive to UNC because I'd have to re-do my music database, right? So if MPExtended will be updated to work with mapped drives soon, I'm happy to wait.

Thanks.