Published by Arto Jarvinen on 06 Jan 2010 at 06:20 pm
Voddler woes
I have just joined as a beta-tester of Voddler, the “Spotify for movies”. It is currently beta-tested in Sweden (only). Unfortunately I don’t have any good news to report yet as I can not get the client up and running at all. It seems to be very sensitive to router settings, firewalls etc. Even disabling every millimeter of protection, and enabling UPNP in the router as per the user guide, I can’t get it to pass the initial test. I’m not alone having these problems it seems.
I do like the idea that the client is built on open source but of course I’m missing a Linux client. The client is still a bit clunky. You can’t use the mouse for instance. That is not a big deal for an HTPC that you control with a remote. It is a bit inconvenient on the desktop though.
I’m sure they (or I) will figure it out eventually. The concept is totally right. I’m a happy subscriber to Spotify Premium and wouldn’t hesitate to shell out a similar amount to get access to a stable stream of good movies.
Unfortunately my small switch broke so there is no easy way currently for me to connect to the Internet directly, without a router. And I will still want to use the program through a router in the end as I want all my computers on the same network. But before that I guess I need a new switch for some unprotected troubleshooting. I did sign up as a beta-tester after all.
Links
[1] www.voddler.com

Tommy Einarsson on 07 Jan 2010 at 08:56 #
Strange that you had problem with Voddler. I installed on my Mac and on a Win XP machine without any trouble at all.
I think I’ll wait for a while until I compare Voddler with Spotify. In my opinion, Voddler is a Spotify with 10 albums…..
(But the software is good, it is after all based on XBMC :-) )
Arto Jarvinen on 07 Jan 2010 at 09:13 #
Hi Tommy, interesting! Do you have any more detailed hints? I guess you have a router too? Did you do port-forwarding? Did you open up the firewall entirely? Any other advice? -A
vertical sync » Easter experiments on 05 Apr 2010 at 20:41 #
[...] a second chance after the epic failure to even connect to their server when I first tried it (see Voddler woes). Also, a friend hinted about XBMC, a media center software that was the basis of the early Voddler [...]