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[moe14]

Hello Everyone,

I'm having strange behavior with DLNA Media Player not working properly in 1 of 2 Zones in my home.

Here's the environment:
Media Center 22 (22.0.93) installed on Mac Mini (late 2014, 2.6 GHz, 8GB of RAM, 1TB disk drive, MacOs Sierra 10.12).
I have a main listening room (Zone A)
I have a family listening room (Zone B)
All equipment is connected via ethernet and on the same LAN.

Here's the issue:
When Selecting "Media Player" from my Roku or any device on my network (Let's call it Zone B) the player appears once and does not allow me to connect, and then the player disappears and never appears again.
In other words no Media Center icon appears. On the Roku it continues to say "Waiting for Media Player" On other devices the Media Player list is empty.

When using the same device from another location in my home (Let's Call it Zone B) Media Center appears when I select Media Server from the Roku device or any other device in in Zone B.

Trouble shooting:

1) I first thought the network switch was bad in Zone B, so I replaced it.

2) Then I thought the device was bad in Zone B so I tried the same device in Zone A and it worked as expected.

3) Next I tried to see what the latency was on the network on Zone A and Zone B. Zone A was 1.7 ms and Zone B was 0.4 ms as reported when doing a ping from the Mac mini which is hosting the Media Center 22 software to the IP address of the device that was the DLNA Receiver (in this case a Roku).

In summary Media Player works as expected in Zone A (Media Center appears and I can play music).
In Zone B, Media Center does not appear when Media Player is selected and when it does appear it stops working after a few songs and Media Center icon disappears; this happens across all of  of my devices that support DLNA Media Player.

Are there configuration settings that will eliminate this behavior or log files that I can review to see if Media Center is throwing errors.

...another way to investigate this issue:

How does Media Server (JRiver MC) query the network for Media Players (Roku, Oppo, A/V Receivers, PS4, etc) that are DLNA compliant?
Are there known networking behavior (restrictions) that may impede the query?

By the way...on the networking side, I am using Netgear WNDR3800 Router(with the latest firmware), and Netgear switches.

Just doing a little brainstorming to get to the bottom of this. Perhaps there are some Server side or Networking configuration changes that I can make to get Media Players to show up consistently across all Zones in my setup.

I know this is a tricky subject matter but any help will be appreciated.

Thanks.

[moe14]

Anyone else seeing inconsistent behavior on DLNA Media Player (for example MC appearing on some devices but not on others - with all devices on the same LAN)?

[moe14]

...OK, making some progress.

I took a look at my Mac Mini network connection settings and noticed that I had wired and wireless activated...Duh. I disabled the wireless connection and that seemed to help quite a bit.

After disabling the wireless and only having the ethernet connection, I noticed that I was getting more action on the DLNA Player side as more devices (BDP, AV Receiver, etc) in my system started listing the Media Center and allowing me to play songs. ...and yes this is from Zone A and B (see beginning of thread).

I'm not out of the woods yet as the behavior is better than before but spotty - meaning it takes a while for DLNA Server to appear on most devices and on one device it is not appearing at all.

Is there a cache on the Media Center Server side that needs to be refreshed when there are network changes? I rebooted the Mac Mini and restarted the Media Center as a means of hoping that I cleared out any stale network settings (if they exists).

I will continue to debug until I get the system stable. I really like the JRiver Media Center Software. I suspect that DLNA operation on A/V devices is unstable.

[blgentry]

In my limited experience with DLNA and MC, MC works better in Push mode than in Pull mode.

That is, trying to browse MC from other devices, using their interfaces, didn't seem to work that well for me.  But, using MC to PUSH songs *to* those devices, using the MC interface, seemed to work better.

For me, the combination of JRemote (or in my case EOS remote), and MC allows me the freedom to select and control music while I'm not sitting at the computer, and the push capability lets me send the music to other devices connected to stereo systems.

Like I said, I have limited experience.  Just sharing.

Good luck.

Brian.

[JimH]

In my limited experience with DLNA and MC, MC works better in Push mode than in Pull mode.

That's not accurate.  There are many variables, including the idiosyncrasies of the devices and the network.  Most devices handle the pull mode, but many don't work in a push mode.

[moe14]

Any way to force MediaCenter to wake up a Media Player by giving MediaCenter the IP address of the Media Player? I'm noticing that on some devices it takes hours for the Media Center to be recognized by the the Media Player.

[moe14]

Problem Solved. It turns out that my Router was going bad. I received a new one from my ISP and all is good now.