ViMu Player uses local storage of your device, connected USB devices (FAT, also NTFS on some devices), Windows shares (also known as SMB), WebDAV servers and UPnP/DLNA servers.

Notice: To edit or delete a bookmark long click on it.

 

USB drives

To use ViMu Player with an USB drive simply connect it to your Google TV. USB drive should have FAT32 filesystem (some units also support NTFS). Your USB drive will appear as a tab.

Notice, that ViMu only displays video/audio files. So, if your directory contains txt, doc, pdf, they will not be displayed.

Amazon Fire TV is currently not able to use USB drives. 

 

Windows shares (SMB)

SMB protocol is that makes your Windows computers to share files between each other. ViMu Player is able to see shared directories of your Windows PC and play video files from them.

Depending on your home network configuration, there are two ways to add your SMB share:

 

• The most simple way is to go Options->Add network resources. There is a chance that your server will appear under Windows shares (SMB) header. You will see the Add Windows share dialog. All you need here is to provide the name of the tab (anything really). Also, if your share is password protected, fill username and password fields. Than press OK. Your share should be accessible now by clicking the tab.

• If you can not see any found Windows shares, things become more complicated. You should determine a hostname of your pc (something like MYPC in Windows) or better the IP address of your PC. Then click Add Windows share manually.... You will see the same dialog described in the way #1. Fill the name of your share and put hostname or IP address of your PC into smb:// field. Again, if your share is password protected, fill username and password.

•  

WebDAV servers

WebDAV is configured similar to SMB. To add WebDAV share go to Options->Add network resources. and click Add WebDAV share...

When using WebDAV, you should always provide ip/domain address, login and password of your server. Good thing with WebDAV is that you can stream from a server over Internet, not only via your home LAN.

 

UPnP/DLNA

To use UPnP/DLNA, you should have a compatible server installed on your PC or NAS.
The following servers were tested: Plex Media Server, XBMC server, Logitech Media Server, Twonky, TVMOBiLi, tversity. To add UPnP/DLNA server use discovery service of ViMu (Options->Add network resources). It should find all media servers in your local network. Click on a server you want to add. Then you can bookmark the whole server (just press Bookmark dir button) or navigate to some subdirectory to bookmark it directly. After pressing the bookmark button, you are allowed to set up a name for your bookmark.

 

HTTP streams

You can open some types of HTTP streams like HLS video streams and HTTP progressive downloaded streams (from IceStream app, for ex).
To open HTTP URL go to Options->Add network resources and click Open HTTP URL...

 

Airplay feature

Airplay feature allows ViMu Player to display some image and video content directly from your Apple device like iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. Also streaming from iTunes application is supported.

 

Start ViMu Player, open some non-protected video on your iPhone and you should see a special button, which allows you to select "ViMu Google TV" as a display. Content should not be protected by DRM in any way. ViMu will play videos stored on your Apple device (like camera shot movies), also iTunes University files work well.

Music streaming is not supported yet. It uses a very different protocol called Airtunes, which is much more difficult to implement on Google TV.

 

You can disable Airplay feature, by checking Options->Application Preferences->Disable Airplay service checkbox.

 

Video playback

For now ViMu Player allows you to play video/audio formats directly supported by your Google TV. Sony Blu-ray is the most "all-eating" devices for now. It will play MKV, MP4, WMV, AVI, TS, VOB, M2TS, MPEG, FLV, 3GP and some other containers. It will decode H.264, MPEG4, MPEG2 and Windows Media video codecs, MP3, Dolby Digital, AAC audio. It will also pass-through DTS sound directly to your receiver.

Sony TV sets supports almost the same, but without DTS pass-through.

If you have several VOB files ripped from DVD (like VTS_00_1.VOB, VTS_00_2.VOB etc), you can play them as a one file. Just click on the corresponding .IFO file (VTS_00_0.IFO).

 

Logitech Revue is not able to play MPEG2-based formats like MPEG, M2TS, TS, VOB. It does support H.264, MPEG4, Windows Media video, but does not support MPEG2. It plays audio tracks encoded in MP3, Dolby Digital, AAC and Vorbis formats. No DTS support, unfortunately.

 

Sometimes, when you have an unsupported codec inside supported container, you will get a sound without an image, or an image without a sound. For example, if you have Sony TV or Logitech Revue and try to play MKV file which contains only DTS tracks, you will have no sound at all. Also, the very common issue with the Revue is to have MKV with MPEG2 encoded video, which will play like a black screen.

 

With some high-bitrate movies (more than 20Mbit/s) you can experience buffering lags. The movie sometimes stops for a couple of seconds, and starts again. It would be either a networking issue (your network or your SMB server is not fast enough) or an issue with ViMu caching system. To resolve ViMu issue you can try to go to Options->Application Ppreferences and play with Cache size option or try to disable caching at all.

The unique feature of ViMu is the ability to switch audio tracks when your movie has more than one track. To do this press ALT (or A or Yellow) during playback.

 

While starting playback (or by pressing some buttons), you could see the infobar. It shows what codecs (Video/Audio/Subtile) does your video have and some parameters like bitrate, current active stream (1/2 means you have 2 audio streams and the first one is active) and language code (if supported).

 

Subtitles

ViMu Player supports two types of subtitles: external SRT files and text subtitles embedded into MKV files.

To play video with external SRT file, you should name it properly. The SRT file should have the same name as your video, but with .srt (lower case) extension. Like, MyMovie.avi and MyMovie.srt.

When ViMu detects some subtitles, it shows pop-up "Subtitles detected". To activate subtitles press S button during playback.

To change subtitle size use + and -/= keys during playback.

MKV embedded subtitles are experimental for now and have some limitations. It supports only SRT and SSA text tracks. VobSub (image) tracks are not supported. Also, subtitle parser do not support forward seeking. I mean, if you seek from the beginning of the long movie to the middle, you will have no subtitles until all skipped part of a file will be parsed.

To switch between embedded subtitle tracks press S (or Blue) during playback.

MKV subtitles support is disabled by default. To activate it go to Options->Application Preferences and mark Enable MKV extended support checkbox.

Notes for UPnP/DLNA: MKV subtitles are usually displayed when streaming from an UPnP/DLNA server, if the server do not transcode video stream. External SRT subtitles are not served by all servers. The one that is reported to work with SRT subtitles is Twonky.

 

Covers and sheets

allows you to store specially generated images for your movies.

 

And also can generate extended information about your movie.

 

To be correctly displayed, your image files should be properly named. There are 3 supported naming templates: 
Basic template: 
If you have a video file called MyMovie.avi, its cover should have name MyMovie.jpg and sheet name should be MyMovie_sheet.jpg. 
If you have a folder with movies called Movies, you should place cover.jpg and sheet.jpg into this directory. 

There are also Movienzer WDTVLive and ThumbGen WDTVLive Movie Sheets templates. These are naming conventions for the files generated by these applications. 
NOTE: Covers and sheets are not supported for UPnP/DLNA streaming. ViMu will, however, display cover art or thumbnail provided by your server.