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[BillyBoyBlue]

I keep running into a brick wall trying to do what on the surface seems should be simple. Please excuse a very long post. My setup:

Panasonic P65ST50 DLNA "certified" 3D 65 inch plasma TV
Netgear 3700 wireless router
QNap TS219PII NAS with 2 3TB Seagate drives installed
Desktop home build custom PC running Windows 7 64 bit with 3 TB storage
Multiple external drives either in FAT 32 or NTFS format
ASUS Transformer 300 tablet

Goal: copy several TB's worth of multimedia files, photos, (JPEG, TIFF) music (mostly MP3), videos, some MP4, mostly MPEG-2)
         to the NAS, then stream them to other networked devices, mainly my new big screen TV.

Issues: Many files won't open at all on any networked device (but play fine off my PC, using Windows Media Player or Media Center) or either play or show just thumbnails, but not both or won't open and play the video at all or play but no thumbnail or a combination of these things depending on media server/player used. Some JPEG's also do this, but much less showing the same issues.

Testing:

I took a group of 24 MPEG-2 vids I made and moved them to a "test" folder on my PC. I accessed this folder from my new Panasonic DLNA capable tv via my WiFi network and they all played fine on the big screen TV. So did a few MPEG4 vids.

I next moved copies of these same files to the NAS, made a new folder under the default multimedia folder and tried to access them. The TV  saw the files, listed them on the TV screen, but refused to play anything off the NAS except for the MPEG4 files while played fine.

I next tried WD TV live hooked up to the TV and using the same Wifi network. It also saw and played ALL the files in my test folder networked to my PC regardless if MPEG-2 or MPEG4 and also created thumbnails. I was happy at this point, my new TV now played all my video files (as long as stored on my PC) and also showed thumbnails. Ditto for images in JPEG.

I then used WD TV Live to try to access copies of the same files on my NAS. It open and played all the files, but refused to generate any thumbnails (a key feature I need having literally thousands and thousands of files).

Next I installed Media Center, everything plays fine off the PC directly. I tried going back to TV, it showed MC as one of the media servers, but again when accessed from the TV showed only a list of files, no thumbnails for vids, (did for JPEG), and again the tv would not play any videos using MC except for the MPEG4 vids.

Next I downloaded the MC Gizmo for Androids, installed on my ASUS Transformer tablet. Again using same WiFi network it found and quickly created thumbnails for my jpeg folders (all 600 of them) and I could easily view them in any way off my tablet.

Now how the #*#$&@ can I use MC or another Media Player to do the same thing, namely both create thumbnails and play all file types off my so-called DLNA Panasonic TV. By the way the tablet using MC wouldn't play any MPEG-2 off the NAS either, nor do anything but make a list of files, most of which it too couldn't open.

In summary, WD Live TV seems at least capable of playing MPEG-2 off the NAS so it seems the issues isn't the TV or at least don't appear that way. Thanks for reading. Who has any ideas or suggestions?

PS... what else if anything needs to be installed to get thumbnails even just for JPEG off the TV using MC? What I'm assuming based on the graphics on a separate article here on MC that it should be able to produce THUMBNAILS on a TV screen, or am I expecting too much?