DLNA function with N1T1

Quoted from Wikipedia, Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) members have stated the common goal of using standards-based technology to make it easier for consumers to use, share and enjoy their digital photos, music and videos. After building up the DLNA network, users will be able to access the file and display on DLNA devices. In my case, the home network devices including PC, NB, PS3 and cell phone. Depends on connection method, these devices have different ways to access N1T1.

Since PC1 and PC2 are connected by cable, I decided to direct mount the N1T1 as a partition disk through CIFS. That makes N1T1 act as a native drive of both PC. I don't need to login using FTP client, unlike DLNA only browses pictures, videos and songs, I can read write all the file types I want freely.

N1T1 can be found correctly in PS3 as a DLNA media server. Photos, songs and movies can be browsed correctly. And since PS3 supports Divx codec, many of the backup movie files can be displayed.

The 2nd device I would like to test is cell phone. I've downloaded a software named Skifta for Android. Skifta works properly to play my songs and photos stored in NAS. Of course, playing my files through DLNA on PC or NB is too easy to explain right here.

There is nothing special about my home network. It was basically built behind a D-Link DIR-300 router, for a 10/100 LAN speed and 54Mbps wireless connection, a very common and entry level of local network environment. I would like to test the multi-play capability of my NAS, but it's a pity that I don't have a HD level movie files to demonstrate. I picked a simple XVID movie files with a 608x464 resolution to do the testing. It's certainly not a HD file, but looks OK on my 42inch TV through PS3-DLNA. At the same time, I've turned on all of my computers and cell phone one by one to play the same file. Totally 5 devices are accessing NAS for movie display, and I'm glad to see that there is not any delay of the movie playing. Then I change my cell phone to play the MP3 files while other devices are still playing the movie. Still, everything works properly as well.

Up to now, N1T1 works great as a home multimedia center. I found from other user's experience for using NAS playing 720P/1080P HD movies. These kind of files seems to meet the limitation of NAS or LAN, I really would like to have a chance to test it some other day.

Using Torrent on N1T1

I'm not a heavy torrent user. As for P2P download, personally I prefer eMule. I understand torrent is technically having a faster downloading speed than eMule, but also a heavy loading to the computer or hard drive. It is great to separate the torrent download from my computer and leave it to NAS.

Using Torrent in N1T1 is very easy. There is a simple and clean torrent viewer at the right top of the NAS main page, next behind the file viewer. And all you have to do is to upload the torrent files which you download from pubic P2P web forums and done. Download speed is mostly depend on your bandwidth and the P2P sharing.

Access - Remote control

To do NAS far end control, it is never easy if NAS is locating behind the router. Although the user manual describe the setting so easy, it doesn't work on my case. According to manual, we need to go to [Network] -> [Remote Access] and enable UPnP port forwarding. If we need a name address, we have to enable DDNS. However, I still need to do something on my router to enable remote access.

I need to set port forwarding to the internal address of NAS as:

port 21 for ftp / port 80 for http / port 9090 for file viewer / port 9091 for torrent

Remember that do not test remote access inside the home network where NAS located.