Unable to play videos?

[jasauders]

I have Subsonic with the full donated license running on my Ubuntu 12.04 system. On my Android device, I am unable to pull up videos... however I can pull them up fine in the Subsonic web interface. I'm pretty much baffled over where the issue could be. I have a Music folder and a Videos folder. I've put mp3's and avi's in both videos. Each time, videos fail, whereas music succeeds, regardless of the folder.

Do I have to enable this somewhere?

[GJ51]

Install flash on the Android device and use Dolphin browser.

[jasauders]

Er... I understood Subsonic on Android supported video playback. Is that true? If that's the case I won't be going the flash route unless absolutely necessary.

[GJ51]

Video is transcoded into flv for streaming and therefore has to be passed to a player compatible with flv playback. There are plans to move past flash and use HLS or HTML 5 in the future, but there is no timetable for when that may happen yet.

[jasauders]

So the key is to have a player that is flv enabled, no? I'm not understanding this. I thought Subsonic itself played the videos. Does Subsonic (the Android app) just pass off videos from my Subsonic server right to an flv enabled video player? Or am I totally missing the point here?

[GJ51]

Yes, as it is currently implemented, the Android app just passes video to the default browser to be played on the flash player.

We are all hoping to see the development of an app with a native player that uses HLS and HTML 5 sometime in the future, but for now the app just passes the video as described above.

[jasauders]

Hate to bump this, but I never really did get any further with it. I'm a big fan of MX Player and currently have it installed, along with Subsonic 3.6. No videos at all show up when I browse the videos folder, whether they're flv's, mkv's, or an mpg. Everything works fine on my desktop though (Ubuntu, Chrome).

My Android device in question is a Nexus 7, Android 4.1.2.

Is it odd that I'm seeing nothing whatsoever listed when I browse my videos folder?

[GJ51]

OK - I'll give this a stab as I just last night put a Jelly Bean rom on my SIII and was able to get video playback.

This is the ONLY way I know how to do it.

First, you have to see your video files in the app. If you have a folder defined in the Subsonic Media files panel as C:\Videos you have to place the video files in subfolders as the app will not look for files in the defined root. So for wxample if you have files sorted by type you would have files in C:\Videos\mp4files\sample.mp4 and so on. Don't whine - it's just the way it is.

Second, on Jelly Bean you need to install flash which isn't as easy as it sounds as everyone today is conspiring to eliminate flash for everyone even though the promised alternatives aren't available to many of us - go figure - the central committee has spoken.

You can find the instructions needed to install flash on Jelly Bean here:

http://liliputing.com/2012/07/how-to-in ... vices.html

Once you have flash properly installed the app will call the browser you select and start playback. I setup the default browser for Subsonic as I couldn't figure out how to prevent Dolphin from updating and the latest Dolphin block flash.

That's how it's done on Android JB. I dropped back to ICS because Wifi Tether isn't running on rooted JB yet, but I had it running fine on JB last night.

[jasauders]

I had no idea that Subsonic doesn't look for files in the defined root. I made a folder and dropped the videos in and bingo - there they were. Nice! I of course ran into the flash issue, but I'll deal with that later. At least I have a concrete lead on where to go from here.

Appreciate your time and quick response!