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[Mediahome]

When playing music on a Roku SoundBridge the processor on the MC server gets spun up to 100%.  Playing MP3 files that do not require conversion play fine.  Most of my library is in WMA Lossless and when I try to play them the problem occurs.  I am using the standard Roku SoundBridge DLNA server profile with "Convert Unsupported Formats" and "MP3 High Bandwidth Stream". 

The really odd thing is that this occurs when you first select the Album - before it even starts to stream the music to the Roku.  The Roku displays "Waiting for a Reply" for about 30 seconds before proceeding to list the songs on the album.  Select a song and it displays "Play songs starting with...?  Select it and it does play the songs so the on-the-fly conversion to an MP3 stream does work.  Looking at the Task Mgr you see all 4 cores running at 100% and 10 - 13 instances of conhost.exe and lame.exe running.  Power off the Roku and the instances of conhost.exe and lame.exe continue to run for several minutes.  Finally they die off and the processors spin down to normal levels.

Now, the really, really odd thing is that if you keep repeating this sequence with the same album it will work OK sometimes.  Select the album and it steps right on through to streaming the file to the Roku with the processor running at 1%.

I noticed that Lame was an old 32 bit version so I found a recent (3.98.4) 64 bit version and put it in the plugins folder.  MC used the newer 64 bit version without a problem (impressive) but that did not have an impact on the problem.

I am running MC 15.0.136 on a Windows 2008 R2 server (it is actually the latest Vail refresh).  I just rebuilt the server so this is a fairly clean installation. 

I look forward to eliminating the old Roku's somewhere along the way but in the meantime my wife wants to play her playlists.   Help!

Mediahome

[Matt]

Any time you see a Lame.exe running, it means we're running the conversion to serve a file.

I wonder, could the Roku be opening all the MP3 files (which are really WMA Lossless files we have to convert) to read the tags?  We expect a device to only actually read a file one at a time, since all the tag information is provided in the DIDL package we deliver over DLNA.

The reason it "just works" sometimes is because the server engine has a caching layer for recently served files.

[Mediahome]

I don't know what is going on here.  It used to work just fine.

[Mediahome]

I rolled back to 15.0.113 and the problem went away.  Looks like something broke between builds 15.0.113 and 15.0.132.

I don't have any builds in between there so I am not able to narrow it down any futher.

Mediahome

[ThoBar]

I'm wondering if this is related to something that happened to me recently.

I was trying to use an iPhad with PlugPlayer to send media from an MC server to a MC renderer... I was wondering why everything was really starting to drag on the server, when I noticed I had 15 (estimate) lame instances running and, as each one would finish, another would fire up.

I think it was trying to convert a whole lotta files unnecessarily -- or I queued them incrrectly and got all files, instead of just 1 or two -- but it does sound very similar.

Unfortunately I cannot go back in versions to test at the moment.

[Mediahome]

Has this been logged as a bug?

[Matt]

This will be fixed in build 139 and later.

Sorry for the trouble.