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The iPad and iPhone apps do not work for me either. I must log in every time. Attempting to view any image files results in "Connection error" messages. This happens even when on the same LAN.
Categories: iPhone & iDevices
I'm having lots of problems with the Pogoplug HD app on my iPad (connected to a new Pogoplug Pro). There seem to be three of four issues that happen constantly to the point where the app is almost useless (in my hands). Here are some of the problems:
1.) The app crashes fairly often. This can happen when trying to view content or even while you are trying to browse the files on the attached hard drive (like the simple act of opening a directory with one or two files in it). I suspect that some of this may be happening because the app is holding onto state information that is no longer correct for the attached drive (that's only a guess, I really don't know why the app crashes so often, I've removed and replaced the app several times and have even done cold restarts on my iPad but the crashes and misbehaviors -- see below -- still happen).
2.) Most of the time when trying to stream video files the app will immediately exit the play mode and drop back into the file view. This happens as soon as the video controls appear in the playback window. These same files play fine using the Pogoplug website (my.pogoplug.com). This problem happens over both WiFi and 3G and even on video files that are encoded at data rates as low as 250Kbps (and that's bits per second, well below both the uplink and downlink on either end of the connection).
3.) The Pogoplug HD app does not remember your user name and password. Well, it will "remember" it if the Pogoplug app is left suspended in the background under iOS 4.x. Unfortunately, the app crashes so often that I'm continually having to re-enter both my user name and password each time I want to use the app.
4.) When suspended (running in the "background" under iOS 4.x) the app appears to remember too much of its state. What I mean is that the app can get in a "wedged" state (non-functional or locked up) and even if you quit the app (using the "Home" button on the iPad) the app will reload into that same wedged state when you relaunch the app. This has happened to me several times when trying to access the "Settings" popup window -- the settings window locks up and thereafter each time you launch the app it goes right back into the now non-functional settings window (can't cancel, can't save a new state, can't dismiss the window). The only way of getting out of this lock up is to go into the iPad's task manager and manually terminate -- quit -- the app).
Well, that's the short list, I've had other problems but the above are the most troublesome. I'm using a Pogoplug Pro with the latest v2.5.9 device firmware. My iPad is running iOS v4.2.1. By the way, the Pogoplug website (my.pogoplug.com) seems to work fairly well on the iPad. The performance on the website isn't flawless, but at least is works most of the time.
December 29, 2010 7:29 AM
I am having similar issues. The iphone app will play movies on my LAN, occasionally I might add, and drops the playback or doesn't play at all (closign out to the file menu as above) when on an outside LAN or on 3G. This happens on my home LAN often as well. Music playback hasn't seemed to be a problem. I have made sure all the required 4365 UDP port is open on the inside and outside. And, the movies are mp4 w/ h.264 codec. Not sure why this is happenning. I am however transcoding and converting files to and from the hard drive connected to the plug.
December 29, 2010 7:34 AM
updated: December 29, 2010 7:36 AM
I am experiencing the same issues and attributed some if it to dumping a ton of files onto the disks and the pogo running through all it's transcoding - tying up too much procssing, last night for the first time I was able to stream video to my laptop (using vlc rather than the pogo app). I can generally get music to stream, but video no way. On my iPhone and iPad they have never worked. I was playing around with the non-HD version on the iPad last night and it seemed more stable.
I've also noticed that the apps are memory hungry and if I turn on a free RAM monitor and watch the memory, if it gets too low the thing craps out. Aware of that, I've been experimenting with lots of free ram to try and get it to work - so far with no success. If I can get it to behave, my plan is to experiment creating symbolic links in other apps to point to the pogo and see if I can getthingss like air video to play media on the pogo rather than the embedded pogo app viewer, etc.
I also want to symlink to air share so i can do generalized file tasks. I tried playing around with iFile last night to traverse the pogo volumes but I could figure it out in the10 min I spent poking around.
December 29, 2010 3:32 PM
Well, I see the crashes and misbehavior even though I've turned off the file transcoding so the PogoPlug device should be doing nothing but trying to stream the video (I've converted my video files to low-bit-rate samples that should be fine for streaming). I haven't added a file in several days and there are only about twenty video files on the entire device. Besides that the streaming works pretty well using the PogoPlug website (my.pogoplug.com). It's only the iPad and iPhone apps that have the problem (Pogoplug HD and Pogoplug respectively). I can switch between the website and apps and the website almost always works but the apps almost always fail (either crash or fail to play the video).
I'm also using very small files (video rates as low as 250Kbps with a duration of less than four minutes). In any case, I've used the Pogoplug website to stream video files that are much larger and at higher data rates (up to about 2Mbps) so I don't think it is a file or bandwidth problem.
January 4, 2011 9:54 PM
Works pretty good for me, but I had to use iTunes on my PC to find the iPad version of the app and install it (for some reason the iPad AppStore app can only find the iPhone version when I search).
Installed and works great with one exception - comm error trying to look at any images (so far only have tried JPEG, and really small sized ones!). Odd.. I can play just about everything else no problems. Figured pictures would have been the first thing they would have tested. Maybe in the next update they can fix.
January 5, 2011 2:08 AM
Well, I've found one cause for the inability to play video files from the Pogoplug HD app. It seems that if you are trying to use a 3G connection to remotely view a video the Pogoplug app will fail just about 100% of the time (video begins to load, then you see the player controls and the app immediately dumps you back to the file view). This is nothing new and I've reported this problem before (as have others). The interesting thing is that after this type of failure (over 3G) you can't get playback to work even on a local WiFi network until you go into the iPad/iPhone task manager and manually quit the Pogoplug HD app that is still "suspended" in the iOS quickstart mode. If you don't do this then your videos won't play even when you are using your local network (i.e. Pogoplug and iPad on the same local network).
This is one of the reasons why I was seeing intermittent video playback failure on my local WiFi network (because in a prior session I had tried to play a video over 3G, which in my hands always fails when using the Pogoplug app). This kind of confirms one of my earlier suspicions in that some of the Pogoplug app failures are being caused by bad state information that is being stored in the suspended app (support for iOS "multitasking" was added in the last update to the Pogoplug app).
This is definitely a bug in the Pogoplug app, they need to make certain that they properly initialize the network state after coming out of the quickstart mode (they can't just load in the prior state and expect it to work under all situations). This may also be one of the reasons for the frequent crashes of the app, once it comes out of the suspended state it may be trying to use bad state information.
Given this, here is what I have found concerning playback of video files using the Pogoplug apps.
1.) With the Pogoplug app playback over 3G seems to fail 100% of the time (at least in my hands and after working with the Pogoplug HD for the last several weeks).
2.) Playback over a good WiFi LAN seems to work most of the time, but if it has failed even once you will probably have to do the workaround I outlined above (i.e. manually quit the app from within the iOS task manager and then restart the app and try to play the video again).
3.) Video playback using the my.pogoplug.com site seems to work pretty well over both 3G and WiFi LANs. It's only the Pogoplug apps that seem to have problems with video files.
January 5, 2011 8:15 AM
Not to beat a dead horse, but both the iPad and iPhone implementations are bad. The web site access kind of works, but the drive software is also lacking on OSX and Windows.
I use other apps like AirVideo (with on-the-fly or batch transcoding) with no problem, I use PDF viewers (AirShare, etc.), and multiple MP3 players. It would be ideal if Pogo would just stream the data out, so you could select whatever app you want to use for playback, similar to iFile (jb) or AirShare. Why does Pogo feel it necessary to reimplement the playback/display mechanisms for all these file types. They should let other developers worry about transcoding and display headaches, and concentrate on the thing that drew us to their product - networking, and hosting your own cloud. Maybe they could set up teaming arrangements with some of these other app developers, and create the best of both worlds.
The Pogo built-in PDF view doesn't even let you zoom - which makes it basically unusable.
January 6, 2011 8:07 PM
So, I figured out, if you jailbreak you can get a PDF to view with the built-in app. Basically, using iFile, you can set up a shortcut to point to the subdirectory under the PogoPlug.app directory, where the app saves things you download. Then clicking them from iFile, you can select your normal PDF viewer.
If anyone is interested, I will explain in more detail. I haven't had time to work this out with video files yet, but I'll fool with that next.
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