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[crocodile69]

I connected a USB flash drive to the USB 3.0 port on the back of the router, and turned on the built-in Media Server in the router. I wanted to be able to play the files on the USB drive on a Sony Media Player in the other room.
The Media Player sees the DLNA:DIR827 allright, but cannot 'see' the USB drive at all, ie it does not find anything to play on this media server.
Is there any other setting that I need to change in the router for this to work?

[AquaManiac]

Sorry, at the moment I do not have experience with the DLNA server using the router's USB port except when I used one formatted with EXT4 file system which promptly locked up the router.

So, how did you format the USB drive? What is its size? How did you place the media content on the USB drive including directories and file names. How and what other system did you use to validate that the information is readable on the USB flash drive.

On another post, the forums indicates you actually have to reboot the router to get the DLNA to recognize new files on the storage media; basically, the router at present lacks a rescan button.

[crocodile69]

So, how did you format the USB drive? What is its size? How did you place the media content on the USB drive including directories and file names. How and what other system did you use to validate that the information is readable on the USB flash drive.

The drive is a Transcend USB 3.0 16GB drive, formatted in NTFS from Windows Vista. 
I only copied a few media files (.mpg, .mp3, .ts, .flv) directly to the root directory.
The files were copied with the drive plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the PC and it worked just fine.
But all that is not very relevant. I'll post a few more useful findings in a minute.

[crocodile69]

So after a couple of reboots and plugging and unplugging the USB drive, the router finally managed to build an index file for the drive, and (some of) the content can now be accessed by DLNA clients on the network.

Unfortunately however, as reported by others in the other thread, it does not update the index when you add or remove files from the drive, nor does it have a re-scan button.
The only way to force a rescan is to reboot the router.

As far as I am concerned, this is not an acceptable or practical solution, and it pretty much makes the built-in media server useless for all practical purposes.
This could, of course, be fixed with a firmware upgrade, but two questions come to mind: will they fix it? and if yes, when will they fix it?
Personally I am very disappointed by this. They make a big deal about this being a DLNA-compliant 'media router' – you'd think they would have tested the media server feature before sending it to production...

[Alainuws]

The media server is very useful. I like to be able to connect an external drive directly to the router.
But true having to reboot the router to have the shared file list updated is annoying.

Please have a fix soon.

Regards