Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[whoareyou]

Should I be able to stream i.e. Radio JRiver over DLNA to a network renderer?   The station plays properly to my local computer so it's working properly in that regard. 
Thanks

[JimH]

Not now.  Maybe in the future.  Maybe.

[whoareyou]

That would be very nice to get working.  Thanks

[RoderickGI]

Jim, do you consider JRiver for Android in the category of network renderer?

Because I thought MC couldn't stream any internet sourced content to a DLNA Renderer. But I have just been looking into it a bit and found that quite a few of the sources under MC's "Streaming" item can be streamed to JRiver for Android. See https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,119998.msg829557.html#msg829557

So it appears that Radio Paradise, PublicRadioFan.com, Radio Swiss, for example, can be streamed to a network renderer. I didn't test other sources. Radio JRiver doesn't work at present, but it comes very close, sending playlist items to JRiver for Android, but just not playing them. It tries to play each track, but fails and skips to the next track.

I just checked that using BubbleUPnP on my phone as the target DLNA Renderer, and that worked the same as for JRiver for Android.

It seems that any time that MC asks if I want to "Play Stream", that a source from the internet will stream to a DLNA Renderer, if that Renderer is selected as the Zone to play to.

Comments?

[Scobie]

I thought MC couldn't stream any content to a DLNA Renderer.

I can certainly stream Radio Paradise to the renderers on my network.

[AndrewFG]

It depends very much on your renderer, and on the remote stream server, and very little on MC itself..

The UPNP / DLNA mechanism for pushing to a renderer is that the Control Point (MC) sends a command SetAVTransportURI to tell the renderer a URL that it should play, and then it sends a command PLAY to tell it to start the actual downloading and playing. Then the renderer does an HTTP GET command to fetch the actual music.

When this GET is for a track that is local on MC then MC can ensure that its response to the HTTP GET is strictly conformant to the UPNP / DLNA specifications; so for example it can transcode the media to a format that the renderer supports, and provide HTTP ContentLength and ContentType headers. But if the GET is sent to a remote streaming source, then MC is not in the loop, and the remote streaming source responds to the GET directly. And if the remote stream server doesn’t provide the right ContentType, or omits (say) a ContentLength header, then the renderer might fail to play the track.

One possible future solution would be for MC to put itself back in the loop when a renderer is attempting to play remote streams. So instead of passing the renderer the direct URL of the remote stream server via the SetAVTransportURI command, it would pass a proxy URL on its own server. Then when the renderer issues it’s HTTP GET, MC would download the remote stream into its own buffer and retransmit the data to the renderer whilst also adding any missing HTTP headers, and/or transcoding the media format if necessary.

PS I think this proxying mechanism is how BubbleUPNP does it..

[RoderickGI]

Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation Andrew.

It would be good if the proxy URL method could be implemented, if it meant that all web sites could be played as a stream in MC, rather than just playing to the Windows Default Audio Device. As it is now it is a bit hit and miss when I try to play a stream, depending on whether JRiver has done something special for a site I guess, such as RP, Radio Swiss, etc.

I've been streaming to JRiver for Android on my phone around the house, and I like it.

[Scobie]

Yeah I agree that would be great if it could be architected that way. Like Roderick I find when it works it works well but sometimes can be hit and miss to get going, if MC could proxy and buffer before streaming then that should give is a bit more control and make it more robust.

[Davidhe19]

Hi, great discussion from people here.  I am relatively new user for MC, a little bit over a year.  Recently, I have been testing different schemes using router/switch to play music stream by using MC as a controller.  What have been discussed here supported why the DSD through DoP is not working in the DLNA mode.  But one thing puzzles me is that why the up-sampling function works in the DSP selection under DLNA mode.

[dtc]

Thanks Andrew. That makes a lot of sense. Good to know the details.  The proxy solution would be a good general purpose solution, although I am sure there would be some issues with it also.  Unfortunately, no DLNA setup is foolproof, as you know so well.

[GoodEnoughGear]

Hi folks, I know this is a bit of a necro, but given the rising prevalence of streamers I think it's worth bubbling this back up.

One of the key advantages to running a proxy for DLNA streams is that you can put the MC DSP engine in the path. You can sort of do this by configuring the Server to add DSP for local files, but of course this does not work for external streams.

Thanks!