GeeXboX

First, I have problems seeing my smb shares from winXP. I used telnet and saw that "smbtree -N" returned nothing. I was unable to mount my shares with smbmount, however it worked just fine with :
mount "//192.168.10.48/video" "/mnt/video" -t cifs -o ro,user=$SMB_USER,pass=$SMB_PWD
where 192.168.10.48 is the IP of my winXP box. Any idea of what could be wrong ?

Second problem is with subtitles. It just doesn't work. I tried via uPnP & SMB. All of my subs are .srt muxed in the .avi files (I used avimux) or in a separate file having the same name than the corresponding .avi file. I cannot see even one of them. They are all working perfectly with all my windows readers : zoom, WMP, media player classic + vobsub.
Are .srt subs not supported or it is something else ?

finally, I could make some subs working. I have to put them in a separate file (embedded ones in the .avi don't work) and rename them exactly like the .avi . I was used to named them "moviename.lang.srt" and it worked fine with all my other players but not with with geexbox apparently.

Is it normal they are not working when embedded ?

How do you propose to "embed" the text fonts in the avi file? To my knowledge, avi allows video and audio stream, but no separate subtitle stream. If I want subtitles in avi, I hard-overlay them when I encode (but then I can't turn them off). Instead, I get the subtitles and I repackage the file with a mkv container. Much better, and I can easily have multiple subtitles/language tracks, and switch between them when I wish.

Also, mplayer does automatic subtitle file loading if the files have exactly the same name, apart from the appropriate extension. i.e. movie_name.avi and movie_name.srt files would work, but movie_name.avi and movie_name_english.srt would not work.

I have repackaged most of my avi files into mkv, and it allows me to merge multiple files into one (e.g. if a movie is contained in 2 files, e.g. movie_cd1.avi and movie_cd2.avi) seamlessly.

wrong it works.
determined by the sub-fuzziness option from mplayer.conf

Yeah, i forgot that...

Ben, what is this option and what should I set it to ? I renamed all of my subs movie_name.language.srt . With vobsub, only the first part of the file name (up to the first dot) is used so it works just fine, but mplayer is apparently using the part until the _last_ dot.

And I have no idea of the way the subs are embedded into .avi file, as I said I use avimux to put .srt into .avi and it works just fine. I'm sure they are not overlaid onto the movie (I can disabled them or choose another language, and avimux is just rewriting the file, not reencoding it). So, they must be in a separate stream. Actually, I can saw the stream in avimux or virtualdubmod, for example, so I'm quite sure this kind of stream is supported in .avi containers.
Anyway, you are saying geexbox only support matroska container format for subs, right ?

No idea about my samba problem by the way ?

MPlayer supports all subs formats (something like 12), not only matroska

I finally solved my samba shares problems by adding the ip of my winXP machine in the DNS string. The shares are now found immediately.
Well, I cannot change the IP of the winXP however ...

I have same problem.
I did not undestand how this was solved.
Can you help ?

He said that in the generator, in the field for DNS server (network tab, from memory) he listed the IP used for his winXP machine. He said that this means that after he has generated/installed a version of geexbox, he cannot change this IP address of the winXP machine without also needing to change the geexbox setup (i.e. rerun generator and reinstall to hdd, if that's your use of geexbox). One way to overcome this that I use on my home network is just to make the DHCP server (ADSL router) only assign IP's above a certain number, and then for the machines that need fixed IP's, I give them a number below that threshold. That way a DHCP allocated IP will never clash with a static IP of one of my fixed IP machines. Understand?