Topic: MC15 as DLNA Controller with XBMC Live (Read 10199 times)

kaczor47 · « **on:** January 09, 2011, 05:57:21 pm »

I am having some DLNA issues with MC15 + XBMC Live, specifically using MC15 as a DLNA controller for XBMC. My media is on a Synology NAS, mapped as a network drive on my laptop with MC 15 installed. Synology is not running as a DLNA server. I am running XBMC Live (latest 10.00 maverick v2 from xbmcfreak) on an Acer Revo.

XBMC does appear in Playing Now. All my audio files (flac, lame mp3) play fine directly from XBMC Live (and also locally on MC15).

When trying to play audio from MC15 by drag-n-dropping files onto the XBMC in Playing Now, I receive an error message that there was a problem controlling the DLNA device. Sometimes the audio comes on momentarily. Also, occasionally it works for a track and then error message appears. I cannot for the life of me find the pattern. Finally, I had previously used MC14 with a similar setup and had success when the audio was Always Converted to Ogg - but this option is not available in MC15 (?).

I think I have all my settings on the XBMC side correct. On the MC15 side I have checked all the DLNA related boxes just to be sure. I have tried both Always Convert Audio (to an uncompressed stream, and mp3) and to Convert if needed. I realise that this could be an issue on the XBMC side and I intend on posting on their forum too, but I would be grateful for some assistance here too. I can provide any necessary logs if needed (just need instruction on how to obtain them!

)

Any suggestions?

I would also be interested to hear from others who have tried the combination of MC15 and XBMC.

Thanks in advance! (btw, this is awesome piece of software, especially with the addition of Gizmo!)
Pawel

JimH · « **Reply #1 on:** January 09, 2011, 06:04:29 pm »

Make sure you have the latest build of MC15. 15.0.172 is on the download page.

I would try always convert and MP3.

Did you try any of the advanced options? UPnP or DLNA, for example. DLNA Extra, for another.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #2 on:** January 09, 2011, 06:07:56 pm »

Quote from: JimH on January 09, 2011, 06:04:29 pm

Make sure you have the latest build of MC15. 15.0.172 is on the download page.

I would try always convert and MP3.

Did you try any of the advanced options? UPnP or DLNA, for example. DLNA Extra, for another.

Jim, thanks for the quick reply.

I am indeed using the latest build. I am certain I have tried always converting to mp3, but I will try again later tonight when I get home.

I did not play with advanced options in MC15 - will do and report back.

pawel

kaczor47 · « **Reply #3 on:** January 11, 2011, 06:28:03 am »

Hi again,

I tried playing with all the settings (including Advanced) as exhaustively as humanly possible. No luck. I tried two installations of XBMC, one Linux Live and another for Windows, which was an older build. Also no luck.

Basically, MC seems to hang momentarily, after 10 seconds the music plays (with artwork, yey!). When I hit OK on the MC error message the playback stops.

For what its worth, an excerpt from the XBMC log file reads:

01:00:05 T:1120910192 M:1269977088 WARNING: FillBuffer: curl failed with code 18
01:00:05 T:1120910192 M:1269977088 ERROR: CFileCurl::CReadState::Open, didn't get any data from stream.

I tried playing between two MC15's and all was fine.

I then installed MC14 and was successful in playing to XBMC when Always Converting to MP3 or Ogg. Artwork does not show. Converting to WAV does not work, nor does Converting Unsupported or Never Converting. Same error log entries as above.

I am happy to help troubleshoot further, just tell me what to do...
I'd love to get this fixed, it would be an absolutely ideal setup for me.

Cheers,
Pawel

bob · « **Reply #4 on:** January 13, 2011, 10:40:58 am »

Thanks for the report, I've setup a equivalent test here and have duplicated what you are seeing. Will let you know when it's tracked down.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #5 on:** January 13, 2011, 01:20:42 pm »

Bob, thanks for that - I appreciate you guys looking into this.

Cheers,
Pawel

tombert · « **Reply #6 on:** January 16, 2011, 07:33:51 am »

As I have similar issues with my Sony TV I would like to report how it (does not) work for me:

I can drag-drop a file to my TV but it starts to play the last file played (i.e. started from the TV) and not the one I drag-dropped onto it ... as well I do see only the progress bar moving but don't see the title.

thx

bob · « **Reply #7 on:** February 22, 2011, 02:45:36 pm »

Quote from: bob on January 13, 2011, 10:40:58 am

Thanks for the report, I've setup a equivalent test here and have duplicated what you are seeing. Will let you know when it's tracked down.

XBMC has a brutally slow reply to the play command. It takes about 11 seconds on my test system before it responds. We've extended the timeout for the play command and it works fine here now...

kaczor47 · « **Reply #8 on:** February 22, 2011, 04:16:41 pm »

I'll check it out on my setup once I get home from work.

In which version/build has this change been made?

JimH · « **Reply #9 on:** February 22, 2011, 05:49:34 pm »

It will appear in an MC16 beta release.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #10 on:** February 28, 2011, 12:24:32 am »

First off, thanks for the efforts.

Unfortunately, it still does not work for me. It does play the first track (after a painful delay, as noted), but it does not go on to the next song on the playlist. Same error as before.

I suspect that this is an xbmc issue. It used to work for me at some stage (and with MC14), however one of the xbmc 10.00 builds broke it. I can't find which one it was. In fact it was possibly running on Win7....

Looks like this will have to be reported to the xbmc devs. I might come back here asking for help with some logs, perhaps?

Cheers,
pawel

bob · « **Reply #11 on:** February 28, 2011, 09:21:32 am »

When you are displaying the xbmc zone in MC, there is a "repeat" setting to the right of the time slider. It's not set to "stop after each item" is it? On mine, it's set to "not repeat".

kaczor47 · « **Reply #12 on:** March 01, 2011, 12:11:02 am »

No, it was not set to "stop after each item". Changing this setting does not change the outcome, though...

bob · « **Reply #13 on:** March 01, 2011, 08:53:40 am »

Maybe I need to try a different version of XBMC. I was testing 10.0.0 beta 3 on OSX. What version are you running? And is it windows 7? 32 or 64 bit?

kaczor47 · « **Reply #14 on:** March 01, 2011, 11:43:35 pm »

I am running XBMC Live, specifically XBMCFreak version 10.00 r35648. It is on an ION platform (ACER Revo). That said, I had similar issues when I was running the regular XBMC Live Dharma version.

I think you can simply run a Live version off a USB, I have tested many releases that way.

MC16 is running on Win7 64-bit.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #15 on:** March 10, 2011, 12:00:26 am »

Ok, so I have done some more investigating....

I installed an old version of XBMC Live, namely Camelot 9.11-repack from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmc/files/

With the latest beta build of MC 16.0.49 everything plays fine but with a very painful 7-10 sec delay in between songs.

BUT, with MC 15.0.172 it plays *instantaneously*, with no problems at all. (mind you artwork doesn't show up)

So, to summarize,

MC 15 + XBMC 9.11 - no delay, plays fine (no artwork)
MC 15 + XBMC 10.0 - DLNA error, nothing plays
MC 16 + XBMC 9.11 - plays with 10sec delay between tracks (artwork shows up)
MC 16 + XBMC 10.0 - plays first track with 10sec delay, but crashes 'often' between tracks (artwork shows up)

MC 15/16 on Win7 64 bit
XBMC live.

Hope this helps!

pawel

bob · « **Reply #16 on:** March 10, 2011, 01:03:25 pm »

Interesting testing results. I DL'd 10.0 release but haven't had a chance to test it yet.

When you say it "crashes" between tracks, what exactly happens?

kaczor47 · « **Reply #17 on:** March 10, 2011, 05:32:13 pm »

Sorry, that was completely uninformative. I get the 'problem controlling the DLNA device' error in MC.

bob · « **Reply #18 on:** March 11, 2011, 05:16:29 pm »

Quote from: kaczor47 on March 10, 2011, 05:32:13 pm

Sorry, that was completely uninformative. I get the 'problem controlling the DLNA device' error in MC.

I can duplicate it. There is something it doesn't like about how we are serving the file it appears... Still looking into it...

kaczor47 · « **Reply #19 on:** March 11, 2011, 05:18:49 pm »

Glad you can duplicate it!

What is strange is how MC15+XBMC9.11 works flawlessly (well, minus cover art, but that is secondary).
XBMC 10.1 came out last night. I will try it later today.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #20 on:** March 21, 2011, 11:03:00 pm »

Just curious, has is been determined what is the culprit here? XBMC or MC?

Should I be looking for help from the XBMC devs?

JimH · « **Reply #21 on:** March 22, 2011, 07:27:38 am »

You could report it to them and tell them we'll provide a license if they want to test.

bob · « **Reply #22 on:** March 22, 2011, 10:32:25 am »

I just tried 10.1 and it still waits 13 seconds or so before playing.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #23 on:** March 22, 2011, 08:40:20 pm »

Quote from: kaczor47 on March 10, 2011, 12:00:26 am

MC 15 + XBMC 9.11 - no delay, plays fine (no artwork)
MC 16 + XBMC 9.11 - plays with 10sec delay between tracks (artwork shows up)

And from the MC side, what has changed between 15 and 16 to cause the above?

I can live with going back to XBMC 9.11, but would prefer to stick to MC16...

bob · « **Reply #24 on:** March 24, 2011, 09:32:17 am »

Quote from: kaczor47 on March 22, 2011, 08:40:20 pm

And from the MC side, what has changed between 15 and 16 to cause the above?

I can live with going back to XBMC 9.11, but would prefer to stick to MC16...

It looks like there are 2 separate issues, one that the 16 shows the delay with either version and the other that 15 shows the delay with versions >9.11.
There were lots of changes between 15 and 16 in the DLNA area so it'd be difficult to track it that way unless we knew exactly when the behavior changed in 16 or what changes happened between XBMC 9.11 and the following version that affected DLNA controllers. As far as I can tell to this point it's got something to do with the HTTP request for the file but I'm not seeing anything out of spec there on our side.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #25 on:** March 25, 2011, 07:48:52 pm »

Excuse me being so persistent, but...

I installed a DLNA app for my Android phone called 2Player http://two-play.com/2player.htm. On it I set XBMC 10.1 as the rendering device. When I play a local file, or from a DLNA server on my Synology NAS it plays flawlessly - no delay at all. But when I select MC16 as a DLNA server there is once again a ~10 seconds delay.

Sorry, just desperately trying to get this setup to work (wife's orders!

)

edit: just noticed that when I set MC DLNA Audio Conversion to Never Convert, FLAC plays with no delay, but mp3s do. This is with MC16 and either version of XBMC.

edit2: ok, I realise I am all over the place here. But, it turns out that I do get the same behaviour when using 2player as the controller instead of MC16. So FLAC with no delay, mp3 with about 10sec. I posted this on the XBMC forum along with a xbmc debug log. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=761367 (post #4, #6]

bob · « **Reply #26 on:** March 28, 2011, 02:30:13 pm »

Quote from: kaczor47 on March 25, 2011, 07:48:52 pm

Excuse me being so persistent, but...

I installed a DLNA app for my Android phone called 2Player http://two-play.com/2player.htm. On it I set XBMC 10.1 as the rendering device. When I play a local file, or from a DLNA server on my Synology NAS it plays flawlessly - no delay at all. But when I select MC16 as a DLNA server there is once again a ~10 seconds delay.

Sorry, just desperately trying to get this setup to work (wife's orders! )

edit: just noticed that when I set MC DLNA Audio Conversion to Never Convert, FLAC plays with no delay, but mp3s do. This is with MC16 and either version of XBMC.

edit2: ok, I realise I am all over the place here. But, it turns out that I do get the same behaviour when using 2player as the controller instead of MC16. So FLAC with no delay, mp3 with about 10sec. I posted this on the XBMC forum along with a xbmc debug log. http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=761367 (post #4, #6]

Got it, it'll be fixed in the next build.
The problem was related to XBMC reading past the end of the file for mp3's. For some reason it didn't do that for flacs.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #27 on:** March 28, 2011, 02:49:04 pm »

fantastic!

kaczor47 · « **Reply #28 on:** March 31, 2011, 12:01:45 am »

The delay in the latest build is indeed gone at last!

But, it seems to play one song over and over again, instead of advancing to the next one in the playlist. Can you verify this?

bob · « **Reply #29 on:** March 31, 2011, 10:04:57 am »

Quote from: kaczor47 on March 31, 2011, 12:01:45 am

The delay in the latest build is indeed gone at last!

But, it seems to play one song over and over again, instead of advancing to the next one in the playlist. Can you verify this?

No, it works for me!
I sent a playlist of mp3's to it and it smoothly advanced to the next track.
Make sure repeat is turned off for the XBMC zone under playing now.

kaczor47 · « **Reply #30 on:** April 02, 2011, 04:39:44 pm »

Works fine, thanks!
I appreciate you fixing this.

Cheers

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Author Topic: MC15 as DLNA Controller with XBMC Live (Read 10199 times)