- Why use MediaWEB and not any other similar software?
- Is MediaWEB secure?
- How do I view my media?
- Why are the Video thumbnails not generated?
- Why does it take so long time to load images the first time?
- Why is swiping or zooming images lagging?
- How to fetch the original image when preview is enabled?
MediaWEB has no required external dependencies. This will make installation / configuration easier and less other applications consuming your resources (CPU, memory, harddrive etc.). For smaller platforms (such as Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, ROCK64 etc.) this is is important.
Yes, MediaWEB only allows read access of media files whithin your media folder. It will prohibit:
- Access non-media files within your media folder
- Access any file outside of your media folder
If you protect your content using a username and password (enable in mediaweb.conf) you should enable TLS/HTTPS, otherwise it would be possible to sniff the network for your username and password.
See README for how to enable authentication and TLS/HTTPS.
Unless you have changed the default port in mediaweb.conf (9834) open a web browser and enter following address:
http://<hostname>:9834
For example, if your IP address is 192.168.1.104 enter:
http://192.168.1.104:9834
If you need to access your images over the Internet you need to enable port forwarding in your router.
Secure that you have installed ffmpeg, and that you have ffmpeg in your PATH environment variable. You can test that ffmpeg is installed and your PATH environment is correctly setup by opening a shell (bash on Linux or cmd.exe on Windows) and enter:
ffmpeg
If ffmpeg is found it is correct. Secure that you have restarted the mediaweb service (or your computer) after the ffmpeg installation.
If only some videos don't have any thumbnail it is because the video format is not supported by ffmpeg.
Thumbnails for images (which do not have EXIF) and videos are generated the first time the file is accessed. This can take quite much time particular for low end platforms (such as Raspbery Pi). Once the thumbnail has been generated it will be stored in the thumbnail cache and browsing the same folder again will be much quicker.
You can configure MediaWEB to pre-generate all the thumbnails (which has not been generated yet) on startup by setting mediaweb.conf configuration parameter:
genthumbsonstartup = on
Also, MediaWEB can generate thumbnails as soon as files are added to the media directory by following configuration parameter:
genthumbsonadd = on
This will improve performance a lot the first time each folder is browsed.
See performance report for details about MediaWEB performance on different architectures.
By default the original images are opened in the viewer. If the images are large (typical 2 - 10 MB) low end platforms (such as mobile browsers) will have a hard time to make a smooth navigation / zooming. Also, it make take some time to download the images if the network bandwidth is limited.
This can be fixed by automatically resizing the images on the server side by enabling image preview with following configuration parameter:
enablepreview = on
It will take some time for the server to resize the image, but once the image has been resized, it will be cached in the same location as the thumbnails. Next time the image is viewed it will be blazing fast. You can also configure MediaWEB to resize the images on startup with genpreviewonstartup configuration parameter.
The size of the preview images is set with the previewmaxside configuration parameter. To limit the height and width to 1000 pixels, set:
previewmaxside = 1000
The aspect ratio of the image will be kept.
Your can also configure MediaWEB to generate the previews during startup and when files are added to the media folder as described in the configuration guide.
You can always download the original image (unresized) by clicking on the image name/title while viewing the image.