Netgear NeoTV 550 - Page 199

Really, hasn't anybody found the solution?!

Yes. Get a Dune player

Just got a 550. Have a 700GB USB drive with music and photos, and the 550 recognizes it as soon as it is plugged into either front or rear USB slots. However, 2 different 8GB USB memory sticks are not recognized in either the front or back slot. They both show up fine on a PC. They have no folders, just an ISO file at the root level. Upgraded over the Internet to the latest firmware. Both USB sticks are NTFS format, and Checkdisk shows no problems.

Edit - tested a total of 6 USB sticks, not including the USB disk. 2 out of 6 were recognized. All fine on PC. Nothing stands out as a cause.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Unfortunately for you, and me, the neo sucks for local content and has been abandoned by netgear.

Did you have similiar issues with USB sticks?

Thanks

I've had issues with USB sticks and even external hard drives (eSATA and USB) not showing up. I would unplug the USB drive from the 550, unplug the 550's power connector, power cycle the USB drive (if it needs its own power), then plug the power back into the 550. This would usually work.

You may also need to disable the DLNA/Play On feature in the System Settings. Maybe.

The 550 is very finicky and well...it kinda sucks as it needs to be power cycled or reset every now and then. BDMV/ISO playback usually requires a power cycle or reboot every third title I play, as it frequently locks up while loading. Oh well. *shrug*

FLAC playback is pretty nice though and I usually don't have problems with that feature.

Do not use USB thumbdrives-the neo will corrupt the partition.

I have this and an HD HomeRun tuner. The NeoTV doesn't recognize the HD HomeRun. I don't have reason to expect that it ever would, since the HD HomeRun works with computers that have the software infrastructure to support a tuner. The NeoTV has no support for a tuner.

Amazing !!! What other use could a front USB port have? A USB disk would normally be attached to the rear port. Seems like a fundamental product defect.

I used it to upgrade to the latest (if you want to call it that) beta firmware.

You are correct

With my usb-stick, the neo would completely lock 50% of the time, starting bluray movies.

Without I cannot cache thumbnails, etc.

Not sure if the next beta firmware, scheduled for February 2013 will solve that (somehow I doubt it).

nice date! February of 2013 may me optimistic though...

Can't you place the cache on your NAS or streaming source?

FWIW, I've been using the front USB port for 8/16GB thumb drives and more than a few 2.5" hard drive via USB case without any issue.

I haven't tried a flash drive in either USB port. Since I can't use a USB hard drive larger than 2TB using both the front and back USB ports gives me up to 4TB Of USB storage available.

I am using a 4GB SD Card in the SD Card slot for caching and BD Live. BD Live actually works for my BD ISOs, but I usually leave BD Live turned off.

I use my 550 for streaming DVD and BD ISOs. I use both USB drives and NAS. I have no stuttering problems with the USB drives on either DVD or BD. I wish zi could say the same for my 3TB Seagate GoFlex Home. The GoFlex is attached to a gigabit router the router is attached to a gigabit switch and the 550 is also attached to the gigabit switch. Sometimes everything works perfectly streaming from the Goflex other times the is stuttering. Phases of the moon perhaps?

The only problem that I have had with the 550 is decoding audio. I would have to say that the implementation of the codecs in the 550 leaves a lot to be desired The solution for me was to set all audio types to bit streaming and letting my Marantz SR6006 do the decoding.

The 550 has worked out well enough in my living room that I just ordered another for the bedroom.

Where is the option to turn off BD-Live? I never could find it heh.

Settings - Audio/Video - Blu-ray options - BDLivd cache location=None

Have to admit when it works it works quite beautifully. My recent lockups seem to came from a bad connection between the power supply and the power input port.

Thanks Holmes.

Netgear support advised me to get a replacement. When it arrives, I'll check all 6 USB sticks and see if it's a HW issue. Thanks a million to all for your insights !!!

Edit - ran some benchmarks on the USB sticks, Using CrystalDiskMark. The two that worked were the 2 slowest.

Edit - new unit arrived, behaves exactly as previous unit did. Will keep Netgear case open.

Just received my 550 and love it. All of my video files are in MKV format and the unit plays them nicely. However questions:

1) Getting cover art/movie info for MKV's? Tagging works automatically for MP4 video files but not MKV. The tagtool appears to require that I manually tag all of MKV files...
2) Accessing Youtube - I can search and obtain the appropriate video clip and listing info, but when I try to play, it indicates that I do not have access to the actual files. Is there a permission somewhere that needs to be set-up?
3) Similar thing for my Mezzmo fileshare. I can access the database but when I go to play the file, I have a permission issue. Yet I can play the same file directly through the 550 without a problem.
4) Music - is there a structure that works? I can't play any music files that it finds. Files are located in their own album folder with the song and coverart...
5) The NetGear v1.9.0 Windows app appears to be the only way to assign shares? And it defaults to C:\\users as a share but it freezes when trying to set it up. Permissions issue?
6) Is there any kind of operating manual for the NTV550? All I received was a brief set-up document.

KWS

I use... it's free.

http://itee.uq.edu.au/~chernich/tagsuite.html

For the most part it works great. Once in a while it fails to find an obvious match and I typically tell it to use another database and it then finds a match. You can use batch mode or individually look up titles.

1) Media Center Master works great for me on .iso files. I assume it works equally well on mkv files.

4) Music "jukebox" works well for me for all my albums. What file format are you using?

6) There is a manual - around 70 pages - available for download on the Netgear website.

Hope that helps.

Thanks, much. I started using EvaTag and it seems to work reasonably well in batch mode. I'll try your option.

Is there a "pass-through" mode for video? In effect bit-streaming video. I want to completely eliminate ANY possible transcoding. Auto does not work, since it upconverts to whatever the AVR can accept, and when I use 720p [99% of my BluRays are recoded to 720p], the video appears to be lower quality than when I use Mezzmo mediashare and my Samsung DLNA enabled BluRay player. My AVR [Onkyo 3008] tells me that it is receiving 720p, so there should be no transcoding but...

BUT LIKE YOU SAID - I get DTSMA and THD audio!! If I can just get the video out that I put in, then it would be perfect. Well, apparently not quite - I discovered that it will not accept EAC3 format, typical of many HDDVDs.

KWS

Thanks as well. I tried MCM first after failing with the NetGear solution, and it didn't work for me. It tried to create a separate file folder for each MKV. Perhaps I was not using the tool correctly. And it seems to do more than I really need, which simply is create a "tag" file with the same name as my MKV. So I'll keep using EvaTag or Charles' recommendation.

And I'll download the manual and take a look, thanks for the heads-up.

KWS

I use MCM for MKV, and it works perfectly. It does indeed create a separate folder for each MKV, but that is what you want it to do. There are tagging files and artwork it creates that are used by the Neo for different views and info screens. They have common names like "folder.jpg," "backdrop.jpg," etc. These have to be in individual folders because the filenames are the same for every movie.

You may have already found this, but there is a setting where you have to checkbox the option to create the Netgear compatible tag.

I have been adding a lot of movies I haven't viewed and just realized (haven't used this guy beyond some testing) there isn't a queue, favorites or some way to flag content. Am I missing some thing or is there an easy way and or work around?

Thanks.

Added: On a related topic does anyone know what basis it uses for Recently Added? I can't see any rhyme or reason. I added 36 movies and it's showing nine as recently added. One having the oldest date and another the latest...

You've hit on something I was querying - I'd like to flag [categorize] some movies of multiple genres as "Favorites" either for me or for my wife. Also would like to create an "Oscar Category" as well...

KWS