Print

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

[avid]

I have been using MC as a back-end service for my domestic entertainment project for over 19 years and it continues to work well. There is a middleware service on a media PC that presents a custom integrated web control interface to allow control from phones. And that middleware service talks to MC via MCWS. The middleware also integrates other apps such as for broadcast TV, Roku, Spotify etc. And it directly talks to the (Yamaha) AV receiver via HTTP and the TV screen via HDCP. This has all proved very reliable.

However, I have been thinking that perhaps the world has moved on since this early design. The AV receiver now has its own DLNA player and its own web remote control. So perhaps the middleware app could get out of the pipeline and allow the AV's web interface to access music via MC's DLNA server using the the same existing MC database.

And this generally works. But there is one Smartlist option that causes the DLNA player to fail. In the middleware app, I have a view called "Lucky Dip" which randomly shows 20 albums from the music database and allows one of these to be selected for playing. This feature is very popular with my wife! But when I tried to add a "Lucky Dip" view to my DLNA server configuration, it does not work.

In the DLNA server configuration, I have rules specified corresponding to a Smartlist:

Code: [Select]

-[Filename (path)]="\Classical\" ~sort=Random ~n=20 where the "~n=20" comes from a modification rule of "Limit number to". With this configuration, the DLNA player still sees 20 album names, but does not recognize any of them as an album - it cannot play any album and instead reports "Access Error". If I remove the "Limit number to" rule, then all albums are playable as expected - but no longer as a random "Lucky Dip".

I wonder if there is a bug in the Smartlist handling for DLNA whereby the "Limit number to" filter on a set of albums does not result in something which can still be recognized by a client as a set of albums?

Does this description make sense and are there any more experimental configurations I could try in order to pin it down? I had been running V28, but I have just paid my upgrade license and am running the latest 29.0.55.