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[doulos]

Hello all,

MediaSteersman has just been released and can be downloaded from here.

MediaSteersman is designed specifically for Android Tablets, trying to make full use of the advanced display capabilities. It has been extensively tested against JRiver MediaCenter.

I look forward to your (preferrably positive) reviews.

Thanks,
Christian Sell

[jmone]

Christian, Well done!  It is a great app.  

It works well on my 10.1" Samsung Galaxy Note (but says it is incompatible with my 5" Note).  Couple of initial comments:
- It would be good to add some cover art to the folder icons on what they contain (instead of just the grey folder) - MS3.JPG
- When you switch back to the Library to play another item you have to press play twice (one to play the item, then a second time to select the player.  It would be good if it just defaulted the second time to the previous player as you are unlikely to change the player each time)
- While the seek bar shows the progression of a song you can not use it to move the playback position.  It also shows the total elapsed time of all items to be played instead of just the song being played.  Eg 1:23 of 1:18:13 (playback posn in the entire album) - MS1.JPG
- I had expected the "Playlist" to show the current playing list of tracks.  Is there anyway of seeing what is in "Playing Now" ?

Overall it is looks terrific on my 10.1 Note!  I could both play locally and use it as a control point as a RC for MC as well.  No issues with this.

I see you have a "Cache" - will this allow for "offline" playback of content.  Eg can you select items to be cached for playback at a later point in time or do you always have to be connected to the DLNA server?

[jmone]

Ahh I see you can "lock" the player by holding it down

[doulos]

Christian, Well done!  It is a great app.  

thanks. Obviously, I would also really appreciate a rating in Google Play!

- It would be good to add some cover art to the folder icons on what they contain (instead of just the grey folder) - MS3.JPG

any suggestions what to show?

- When you switch back to the Library to play another item you have to press play twice (one to play the item, then a second time to select the player.  It would be good if it just defaulted the second time to the previous player as you are unlikely to change the player each time)

you already found the answer, which is good, as it proves the UI is fairly intuitive in that area. I am however not sure whether the "locked" feature works in all circumstances, as it was only recently introduced...

- While the seek bar shows the progression of a song you can not use it to move the playback position.  It also shows the total elapsed time of all items to be played instead of just the song being played.  Eg 1:23 of 1:18:13 (playback posn in the entire album) - MS1.JPG

yeah, I know. I was thinking of adding a per-track progress indicator to the tracklist (see below). Seeking is also on the list of future extensions

- I had expected the "Playlist" to show the current playing list of tracks.  Is there anyway of seeing what is in "Playing Now" ?

good question (as it allows me to introduce another existing feature). When in the player view, just press the "song" icon (or swipe from right to left over the right border), and you will see the track list appear, with the currently playing track highlighted. You can remove the list again by swiping to the right.

I see you have a "Cache" - will this allow for "offline" playback of content.  Eg can you select items to be cached for playback at a later point in time or do you always have to be connected to the DLNA server?

no, the cache is for images (album art, photos) only. One obvious extension for MS would be to add a local music server (a local player already exists), to which one could then download stuff that is stored remotely. That is on the list, but I cannot promise anything yet..

thanks for the feedback (and dont forget the rating)
Christian

[Arcturus]

Very very nice. I will wright a review soon. Expect it to be very positive.

It looks great, Has meta data and many other things I wanted in gizmo.

I will test the hell out of it later tonight on my Nexus 10 and 7.

But seriously h0ly **** its nice and shows so much potential.


EDIT.

Here is a little bug report for you.........

BTW I run stock android 4.2.2 with no weird launchers or anything bizarre running. Device is also not rooted or anything special as Nexus device's usually don't scream to be rooted.

Sadly It's CrashZilla on both my Nexus 7 and and Nexus 10 . It's crashed on me several times so far at random moments out of the blue. Examples, Simply browsing my files and again when I tried to start playback and another time when I was in the settings looking at the acknowledgments so on. No Rhyme or reason to it just crashes a lot.

When you switch from landscape to portrait the player will blank out all the information cover art until you return it to landscape.

I went into Artist under Audio and started to scroll down but oddly it stopped at the letter K and it looked like I was at the bottom of the list which can't be right, Then it crashed heh. I have a pretty big collection, 26857 files 410gb. Not the biggest collection by any means but not small either.  

One other oddity is it does see my library after many seconds dunno if that can be improved but whats odd is after say 3-5 minutes another library pops up with a windows looking icon on it. If I try to go in that one I get a access denied with an error. The generic one however which is the first one it see's does work fine though. On my Nexus  10 sometime the library vanishes just by me clicking around the options. Then it magically re-appears. Seems to find my library a lot faster on my Nexus 10 then my 7.

The search function does not really seem to work so well either at least not for me so far. Doing a simple artist search for example does not seem to do anything so some work needed on that as well.

One last little thing is the album artwork which normally shows up great on gizmo (Or any other apps I use) does not show up as nice as it should. Most of my artwork is 700x700 or 500x500 but what shows up looks like 350x350 or worse its blurry / muddled.  Seeing as you designed this to take advantage of higher resolution screens you might want to work on whatever is rendering those images and see if you can't boost the quality. This is way more noticeable on my Nexus 10 because of the very high screen resolution or perhaps its a bug caused by the resolution ?

I think you need a lot more extensive testing cause in this state its not really usable as its too unstable and has far too many bugs to use on a regular basis. Keeping in mind your app is very new this is normal though and I still cheer you for putting the effort into it. If you kept all the functions it has and ironed out all the problems it would be the best thing out there so I would suggest before you add any other functions you fix what's already there.

I won't rate it for now as it would not be fair to you, Seeing as it is unusable on my Google branded Nexus tablets running Jellybean 4.2.2 the rating would not be very high.  I will gladly give it 5 stars once it is though. At that point I'd probably request you put a donate button under the settings so I could buy you a beer or 2 or a dozen

If you want a good beta tester let me know I would be thrilled to help. I got 3 android devices here as a test bed.
Look forward to seeing your software develop and crush all these bugs.

One question though, Did you test this on the latest jelly bean ? Maybe some of the issues stem from that.
I ask this cause the chipsets on the 2 devices I tested them on so far are very different so much so that it should not be a hardware issue. Also interesting that jmone above had no issues like I did.  I'd be curious to know what version of android he is running. I know not everyone is running the latest in fact its probably the minority of people doing so.


Seriously though don't take this long bug report in a bad way your app shows great potential so keep at it. I look forward to seeing what you can do with it.

If you'd like another tester feel free to pm me. I will happily help you test out new builds cause I really love what you are trying to do.









 

[doulos]

Hello,

thanks for the extensive test report, and sorry for the bad experiences. It is this kind of testing and reporting that I have been looking for for about 1/2 year while running my "closed beta". Of the roughly 4 dozen people that registered, and for whom I maintained a closed forum, I got 3 short reports. So I think it is the best way to just put it into the open

Everything you reported will be taken care of. I have already fixed the crashes that were reported via Google Play, so there should be some improvement. I do need detailed info - just saying "it crashed" doesnt help much. Don't you get the "send crash report via email" dialog (should be generated by the built-in crash reporting system)?

I have a Nexus 10 and a Nexus 7 right here, so that should not be the issue. But there is a host of other factors that come into play. Good decision to hold back your rating - it makes no sense to lure people into a bad experience with one enthusiastic report. I'd really appreciate if you stuck with me here.

thanks again,
Christian

[jmone]

FYI - I've not had much time to post more on this.  I got an update from the Play Store a couple of days ago and was just getting error msg so will post more in the next day or so.

[Arcturus]

@Christian

For sure I will stick by you here. Great to see people developing these types of apps.

As for only saying it crashed I kept it short cause the reply was already getting to long. If you want more details feel free to ask but most of them where "The app has stopped working Wait or Close" Sometimes a crash with a bug report. The rest I went into detail on.

[doulos]

"stopped working" is not good. Let me know how often that happens. It may be that my app is doing too much in the foreground, and Android decides "you are slowing down the UI too much, get out of here".

If the "send crash report" option appears, by all means confirm it and have it send me the email. I have so far not received any reports through that channel, only 3 reports that were automatically generated by the OS and appeared in Google Play console..

thanks,
chris

[Arcturus]

So testing it again now. It seems to behave slightly better on my nexus 10.

I found another potential problem. If I enable Authentication under JRiver's Media Network DLNA it did not detect my library, At least not in the 5 minutes I let it sit on the desk beside me. This is where you set a username and password to access outside of the network like if you wanted to listen to the media you have at home at your work or wherever.

So I turned that off, And it took a good 3 minutes to see my library again. Normally DLNA apps/devices in my house find it pretty fast like within seconds in some cases (probably because they cache and remember). Another app I have used with JRiver (iMediaShare on android) had this issue as well. Dunno what you can do to speed that up. At the moment I am sitting right next to my router and HTPC also. Gizmo takes about 2 seconds to connect but it also remembers the server, If possible you might want to do something similar so it does not have to search every single time you start it up.


I also again went into Audio/Artist and again it stops at the letter K which I find very odd. But if I go into recent I do see artists/albums that go beyond that.  At least this time it didn't crash but cuts off there as if there was nothing beyond that.

Another issue and this is more a UI thing is that sometimes when I am say browsing images,music,video's the left side tree with does not have enough space so instead of seeing Recent Movie so on you see Rec... Mov... and its only maybe using 1/10th of the screen instead of a third like it normally does. This is something that happens some times or doesn't its very random.

About the "This app has stopped working wait for it" those errors appear out of nowhere and no particualr behaviour sets it off it has even done this to me sitting on my desk without even me touching it.

As someone else stated being able to use the play position point to move forward or back would be pretty essential. Other DLNA apps allow this so hopefully you can get that working at some point.

[doulos]

thanks for your report.

So testing it again now. It seems to behave slightly better on my nexus 10.

strange. I never get to see these problems on my nexus 10/7. Maybe it has to do with the size of your library, and your network environment. I'll keep an eye on that, as it is very bad when it happens.

Your comments about caching/saving the devices probably point in the right direction. Some networks seem to be less reliable than others, which already lead me to consider creating a local cache of once detected devices.

I dont know how I could deal with the authentication thing. It seems to me this is server specific, so it cannot be handled generically on the UPnP level.

I also again went into Audio/Artist and again it stops at the letter K which I find very odd. But if I go into recent I do see artists/albums that go beyond that.  At least this time it didn't crash but cuts off there as if there was nothing beyond that.

strange indeed. Could it be that the server is only delivering the results piece by piece? I am not aware of a UPnP command that covers that. One thing you could do when that happens, is go to the Settings->Debugging menu, and choose the "send error report" option, which will generate an email with attached Log file excerpt for me to look at. Before doing that, turn all logging options on.

Another issue and this is more a UI thing is that sometimes when I am say browsing images,music,video's the left side tree with does not have enough space so instead of seeing Recent Movie so on you see Rec... Mov... and its only maybe using 1/10th of the screen instead of a third like it normally does. This is something that happens some times or doesn't its very random.

again strange. The size of the list on the left side (I assume you mean that when you mention a "tree") is fixed. It can only be changed by swiping a finger over the border between the list and the detail view, or hidden by using the "hide list" button in the action bar.

As someone else stated being able to use the play position point to move forward or back would be pretty essential. Other DLNA apps allow this so hopefully you can get that working at some point.

that is a fairly nasty one. When you drag the position over the length of an album of, say, 10 tracks, this means that you may be positioning across several tracks, which I would have to calculate to determine the target track and the position into that track. I personally never position anywhere else but to the beginning of a track. But heck, if everyone's asking for it.. its only my time and money (joking)..

[jmone]

FYI - I've started getting a lot of these errors (both on Audio and Video) when playing back to the local device (10.1" Note)

[doulos]

thanks. That'll be easy to take care of..

[jmone]

Good stuff.  I sat down to do some proper testing and get a bunch of these but it only appeared after the Play store updated the version a couple of days ago. 

[doulos]

thanks for that, too. I changed the sequence of commands to cater for the requirements of my newly acquired DENON DNP-F109, and obvioulsy forgot to update the internal player. Need to retest the Sony CMT-G2NiP and JRiver's renderer as well (only affects players that support gapless). Expect the fix by tomorrow night (european TZ)

[Arcturus]

I was over at a friends house last night who the day before installed JRiver. After he gave me his wifi key I began to show him all the upnp apps I had on my nexus 7 that could interact with it.  First I showed him skifta and started to play music off my tablet then a video off his library, His DLNA network showed up immediately. That app is real simple though so it just works. Then I showed him iMediaShare which took a little longer but I then started to beam youtube videos and a few random HD podcasts off the net to his DLNA server.  Then I showed him your app which took a bit longer then the other 2 but then the interesting bit.

He was like wow those are badass, Let me try them. So he started to install the same set of apps none of them worked and would not see his DLNA server and we waited a while. We both started Gizmo at the same time and were both able to connect but that is not DLNA. So I killed everything I had running and shut down my Nexus 7. 2-3 minutes later magically all 3 apps started to see his DLNA server on his Galaxy Tab 2. Then to see if there was any logic behind this I started up my Nexus 7 again but this time I was the one who could not connect to his DLNA server in any of the apps I mentioned.

So I am beginning to wonder if DLNA has some limit on how many devices/applications it will allow control at once. Or maybe this problem resides in the way Windows deals with DLNA servers.

I am going to restrict my test's to only 1 tablet, My nexus 7 since its just better to have when you are on the couch as a remote seeing as it fits comfortably in 1 hand and then see if it can behave better at least for detecting the DLNA library and server.

On another matter, Artist name stopping on K, This did not happen to me on his setup but he had yet to add all his media so his library was pretty small. Like about 3000 or so files. Some memory limit your software is hitting maybe.
I know being able to handle a large database gracefully is the holy grail for media apps. As far as desktop apps are concerned JRiver is probably the first one I have encountered able to do this and also able to keep up with even the most minute or grandiose changes made outside of the app IE, Moving,Renaming,Altering Tags so on. Everything else I used would either become sluggish or unstable or not see changes and required rescanning.

What sucks about that though is it sorta is a major road block for me to test the app at least if I want to listen to music cause there is a lot of music artist's names that start after K . Hope you can at least get that issue resolved.

About the authentication option under DLNA, It is not a huge deal cause I rarely use it. In fact I probably just use it to show off like I did with my friend last night (pushing files from my home network straight onto his JRiver DLNA setup) and it only takes a second to turn on / off anyway.

One last thing worth mentioning and I should have probably done this at first but I just realized I have my update channel set to latest. Running 18.0.166 right now. Might be an issue or maybe not still there you go.

[IlPadrino]

I'm not seeing the server...  is there a way to make it refresh them?

[doulos]

Press the refresh button in the action bar. Recent beta Version of MC introduced a bug in ssdp discovery. Make sure you're not hit by that

[jmone]

FYI, got the V0.9.8 and now (as you pointed out in the beta stream) I've lost discoverability of the MC DLNA servers.  FYI - there was no prob on the prior version of MediaSteersman

[doulos]

0.9.8 has a lot of important improvements. There was a major resource leak in previous versions. I am also now picking the best resolution image for the details views.

Code related to DLNA discovery was not changed in any way in recent MediaSteersman versions, and all other servers (including MC 18.164, which was recommended by bob) show up immediately in my network. I dont think MS has anything to do with this

[Arcturus]

0.9.8 has a lot of important improvements. There was a major resource leak in previous versions. I am also now picking the best resolution image for the details views.

Code related to DLNA discovery was not changed in any way in recent MediaSteersman versions, and all other servers (including MC 18.164, which was recommended by bob) show up immediately in my network. I dont think MS has anything to do with this

I am running 166. Makes me feel like downgrading, Not sure about how safe that is though.

[doulos]

I am running 166. Makes me feel like downgrading, Not sure about how safe that is though.

Done it twice in the last few days, no issues.

[IlPadrino]

Yeah...  I'm using the latest beta.  What's the last known working version?

[JimH]

Yeah...  I'm using the latest beta.  What's the last known working version?

You could read doulos's posts to find it.

[jmone]

Doing some testing with the latest Beta and while the two are working better together I'm still seeing some issues when trying to playback to the local device as the renderer:
- Occasional delays in MediaS seeing the MC DLNA Libraries.  I have also had the MC DLNA Libraries disappear from MediaS and playback stops (as well as the transcoding cache)
- When selecting a video to playback there can be a long wait till it starts but there is no indication in MediaS that anything is happening (eg It would be good to have a "Preparing" style animation)
- I'm not sure what (if anything) you can do about updating the seek bar duration in the video app to the actual video length (not the just the bit has been decoded).  eg The video (AVC/AAC in a TS container) that MediaS handed over to my Android Player (MXPlayer Pro) has the duration as 4:15.  MX Pro keeps playing passed that point but the duration never updates so seeking can only be done in the first 4:15 in this case.  I can stop playback in MXPlayer (going back to MediaS) then start again at which point the duration is now 13:56 which is where the transcoding had got up to.

[jmone]

Also...re losing the DLNA servers some pics:

In MSM1.JPG you can see me in the Player Tab (with the Playing Now list up) but it is missing all my DLNA Servers from "MAIN" as if they have dropped out.  I then pressed the Library Tab and got the error shown on MSM2.JPG (note I'd connected the "Main (Generic DLNA) library")

[jmone]

On the Playing Now list shown in MSM1 above, if find it kinda strange in the way it is a transparent windows over the Player tab.  You can also scroll through the list and highlight tracks but it does not do anything.  To me it would make sense to put it into "Playlists" as "Playing Now"

[doulos]

Hello jmone,

thanks for the comments, much appreciated. Heres what I have to say:

re. servers disappearing: here we have a misunderstanding. When you are in the "player" tab, the list on the left will show player devices ("renderers") only, while in the "library" tab you will see media servers. What gets confusing here is the fact that MC can act as both a server and a renderer, so you will see the MC icon appear on both tabs, while they are in fact different devices.

There are cases where a server really disappears due to networking problems. To handle that case better, I will implement a local cache for once-detected devices.

The error you are showing in the second picture is something I cannot do much about - the server is simply in a bad mood. The same call will succeed just monents later. What I could (might) do is just suppress this message and repeat the call.

re. local video playback: nothing I can do. I am simply handing over to the external app and hoping for the best. I do offer an internal video player option whose state I can track + manage more closely, but that player only has very limited format support, as it is based on the stock android player API.

re. playing now list: A playlist according to my definition is a user-defined list of playable items which is persistently stored along with some user-defined descriptive data. That IMO is quite different from the "playing now" list, which I still think belongs where the playing takes place, and where you see the other items that represent playback state (e.g., the progress bar). Bottom line: I won't promise change here (but still appreciate your comment). I do agree that the list might do something when tapped on - like, for example, move to the tapped-on song.

thanks so far. I'll go over your comments again when I have my next dedicated MediaSteersman day

chris

[Arcturus]

I ordered a new router that is DLNA certified. Seems this is the root cause for slow detection and it forgetting servers if the router is not DLNA certified. When I bought mine DLNA was not even on my radar at the time. Have this issue as well as slow detection on every DLNA app I have tried.

Got a WD My Net 900. Heard good things so hope that works out. Will be able to test the app in a much better environment after.

[Arcturus]

Well the new router solved pretty much everything for this app as well as every other DLNA app I been playing with.

Library vanishing, Extremely long search time to find library's and players,Trying to run the app on more then one tablet at once. All solved.  This also seems to have massively improved the apps stability as well. Have not gotten the "this app has stopped working message without bug report" yet. Guessing the unstable connection was also making the app unstable.

Also going through my library which is a bit large is way smoother now, No huge lag if I would scroll down too fast.

My old router a D-Link DIR-825 was not DLNA certified and this really seems to have been the root cause.  Was going to change it anyway so the DLNA issue was the final nail in its coffin.

[Mike Rubin]

My old router a D-Link DIR-825 was not DLNA certified and this really seems to have been the root cause.  Was going to change it anyway so the DLNA issue was the final nail in its coffin.

I have this router, too, but haven't had major complaints about the performance of DLNA apps. However, I always am interested in performance improvements. With what did you replace yours?

EDIT: Never mind.    Missed the previous post mentioning the WD. 

[jmone]

I see you have added "added local server functionality" is there a way of pushing or pulling content to the local cache for later off line local playback?
Thanks
Nathan

[doulos]

is there a way of pushing or pulling content to the local cache for later off line local playback?

nothing built directly into the app. What you need to do is use any available means to connect to your external device and copy your media files into the Android media directories, namely, "Music", "Video" and "Pictures" at the root of the built-in storage. These directories are automatically scanned by the Abdroid media scanner, and thus become available to my app (and any other app that accesses the android media store).

I personally use the AndSMB app to copy files from a Windows share (on my NAS) to the tablet. I was myself rather amazed that there was no "default" way of getting media files to the device, but you have to consider that google has their own interests in how you access your media. I assume if you upload music to Google Play you can also choose some "offline" option, which will cause the files to land in the mentioned places.

regards,
chris

[doulos]

or, do a search for "file upload" in the play store, theres plenty of options to choose from

[jmone]

Thanks Chris.  I can use MC to push to the Tablet the preferred converted Video/Audio using the HH profile when it is connected via USB.  It was more a Q on the ability to connect over Wireless where instead of "playing" the content it can be cached.

[doulos]

ah. Conceivable, in the sense of an option "copy to local media server". However not currently available

[Arcturus]

I have this router, too, but haven't had major complaints about the performance of DLNA apps. However, I always am interested in performance improvements. With what did you replace yours?

EDIT: Never mind.    Missed the previous post mentioning the WD. 

It's not that DLNA apps did not work its that they worked so much better after especially this one.
The DIR is not certified and nobody was doing DLNA back then. It still worked but was easy to mess up which was a similar thing I saw with other non DLNA cert routers. 

One other thing of note though I had UPNP turned off on that router because of a very bad upnp exploit that D-Link has yet to properly address. I dunno if having upnp off made it worse or not but it was the only way to secure the router otherwise anyone outside can basically root your router. Kind of mad at them because fixing the issue is simple but they just did not seem to care.

[Ekpen]

Christian,

I was one of those that tried to test this software, when you were looking for a tester. Unfortunately, I have a Samsung Note   1st gen.
My contract will be up in about three weeks, and I will be getting a new 2014 Galaxy note 3 and a 12.2  Galaxy Pro.

I checked to see if you still have this software online, it looks like it has been removed.
are you going to make it available again?
Are you going to update it to handle the 12.2 Galaxy Pro real estate screen?
It will be fine if it can include 5 inch screen, if it is not going to be too much trouble in updating it.

I am awaiting  your response.

Thanks in advance.

George

[doulos]

Hello George,

actually, I have given up on developing MediaSteersman any further. The amount of effort to keep up with UPnP and with the android platform was just too high, and download numbers so low that there was no way to justify further investment. I have also withdrawn it from google play as I did not want to watch negative ratings accumulate, and receive mails that I would always have to answer the same way.

One thing I now understand is why there are so few (if any) fully tablet-optimized apps. The Android platform is just not suitable for complex user interfaces, it is awkward to program and contains downright bugs that I wasn't able to work around. Apart from the user interface, BubbleUPnP is a much better tool, as it focuses on handling UPnP and has been doing that for much longer than my app.

regards,
Christian

[JimH]

Christian,
Sorry to hear that, but it's understandable.  Thanks for your efforts.

Jim

[Ekpen]

Hello George,

actually, I have given up on developing MediaSteersman any further. The amount of effort to keep up with UPnP and with the android platform was just too high, and download numbers so low that there was no way to justify further investment. I have also withdrawn it from google play as I did not want to watch negative ratings accumulate, and receive mails that I would always have to answer the same way.

One thing I now understand is why there are so few (if any) fully tablet-optimized apps. The Android platform is just not suitable for complex user interfaces, it is awkward to program and contains downright bugs that I wasn't able to work around. Apart from the user interface, BubbleUPnP is a much better tool, as it focuses on handling UPnP and has been doing that for much longer than my app.

regards,
Christian

I am very sorry to read about this.

Thanks for the effort.

George.