Samba

Mapping Xtreamer as a drive

This one is as easy as mapping a shared folder on your Windows network. As I connected my Xtreamer via wired network cable and enabled DHCP it got its IP automatically. The only thing I had to do then is rightclicking on "My Computer", selecting "Map Network Drive" followed by choosing a drive letter (I chose X: hehe).

After hitting "Browse" I searched for my Xtreamer. At this point I noticed that the network name of the Xtreamer is "Venus" uhhhhhhh yeahhh :) ... inside Venus I found the Samba share called "Xtreamer" and selected this one. In case you know your Xtreamer's IP you can also just enter that directly.

Update 2009/11/04
Note that since firmware v2.0 the Xtreamer's name is not VENUS anymore but MYXTREAMER. If you want to change it back to VENUS or something different, you can do that from the webinterface.

I then ended up with a new drive X: which showed my USB stick and my external hard disks. Each of them in its own folder as you are used to on Linux in the /dev location.

Funny that (Xtreamer is based on Linux) it adds drive letters to the storage devices as you know it from Wnidows. The internal HDD is C: for example and so on...

Copying files from Xtreamer to PC

Copying a file from the Xtreamer to my PC over SMB is giving me about 5-6 MB/sec. Should be enough for my 10MBit Transformers 1080p and yes... trying to stream from the Xtreamer to my PC it took some little time for loading but the file played nicely on my PC screen. I haven't watched the whole movie neither have I tried to jump to another timestamp though but I am pretty sure the Xtreamer handles it well.

Copying files from PC to Xtreamer

Unfortunately copying another file to the Xtreamer results in a not-enough-space-left-error but it let me chose to continue copying. I knew for sure that there should be plenty of space on the hard disk so I chose yes. The transfer speed is very bad in that direction. I got a max speed of only 2 MB/sec which varies very often down to 500 KB/sec. Testing the same with the FTP protocol resulted in more stable and constant 2.2 MB/sec! 

Fast mapping/unmapping Xtreamer

As a matter of fact the Samba share makes the Windows PC slow down and hang sometimes when browsing devices on the PC. To avoid this, you could set up 2 batch files to quickly map or unmap the Xtreamer to your X: drive letter. These are two examples:

Just rightclick the links, choose "Save Link/File As" and store the files to your desktop and rename their file extension from .txt to .bat - with these batch files it should be a piece of cake to map the Xtreamer only when you need it.

Pictures