Requirements and Best Practices

1. Blu-ray player with BD Live (Profile 2.0).
2. Home LAN (Local Area Network) with connection to the player. We recommend a wired Ethernet or wireless-N network. Wireless-G may be too slow for HD movies.
3. Player requires a minimum memory of 1GB. Larger memories are preferred for jumping back and forth through the HD movies since more of the movie is available locally and does not have to be received from the server. We recommend 4-8GB for playing 720p movies, 16GB+ for 1080p. All players accept memories formatted as FAT32 format.
4. Use newer memory device since older devices are generally much slower. Players slow down dramatically with slow memory devices. Some players even hang with slow devices. MicroSD cards (with SD adapters) work best in players requiring SD card memory.
5. A computer (Windows 7/Vista/XP/Windows Home Server), or Mac OS X 10.5/6, or Linux connected to the home network. The computer network connection speed is as important as the player network connection speed. We recommend a wired Ethernet or wireless-N connection for the server.
6. Use a fast computer with large storage space for playing HD movies. Each HD movie can take 4-40GB of space. If a movie is to be converted to a player compatible format, a significant computational effort may be required. If using a laptop, make sure it well ventilated to avoid overheating.
7. Update Blu-ray player and server software when updates are available. Rendr updates itself automatically.
8. Tell PS3MS where your media items are located by dragging and dropping folders to the PS3MS main window. This allows the server to make these items ready for playing. Alternatively, you can edit SCAN.txt (in data directory, see How To) file writing one folder path per line. When you add additional media items to these folders, the PS3MS will automatically analyze them making Rendr browsing and playing faster.
9. Please disable the Sleep or Hibernate power saving mode otherwise the server may enter Sleep mode while serving the media.
10. The server may create files with extension ".m2ts" and ".blu" for video items. These files contain the video in Blu-ray format and video playing information respectively. These files can be safely deleted but would have to be recreated if the video is played again.

Streaming HD Movies

For best performance, prepare HD movies for your Blu-ray player in advance using number 0 key command “Transcode for Later.” The movie will be converted in background to a format compatible with your player and stored in the same directory as the original with “.m2ts” extension added.

Converting movie to a format compatible with your Blu-ray player can take, depending upon your server’s performance, 1 minute per minute of the movie. In addition, the streaming time for HD movies can be as much as 1 minute per minute of the movie. If a movie is already in a compatible format, no conversion is needed while the movie is being streamed allowing streaming at the maximum speed available.

Player Specific Limitations

Player Capabilities

Blu-ray players are classified as NTSC, PAL, or universal which can play both NTSC and PAL formats. Each of these players play videos encoded as MPEG2, H.264 (AVC), and VC1 in sizes and frame rates listed below. Other sizes and frame rates require videos to be transcoded to a player compatible format.

Rendr Not Yet Completed Items

1. Playing audio and video from web
2. Subtitle track handling is not complete