Transcoding HLS streams

[rpmoore]

Richer Sounds customer services have taken 3 weeks to finally inform me there are currently no plans to support AAC HLS on the CXN. With the BBC due to turn off the Shoutcast MP3 streams in 1-2 years, that means that the streamer is sadly going back to the store. £700 is too much to pay for a product that might soon be defunct.

Thanks to @simoncn and this forum, I have learned quite a lot about the subject and will stick with a Raspberry Pi running Rune and external DAC as a solution for now.

[FakePlasticDunk]

(17-09-2015 21:41)simoncn Wrote:  

(14-09-2015 10:28)rpmoore Wrote:  @simoncn - attached is my logfile of attempting to get the Cambridge CXN working. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Richard

The important line from the log is this one:

HTTPSource: byte-range request could not be satisfied

As discussed in previous posts, there is no solution or workaround for this issue. Any renderer that sends byte-range requests can't be used with a live radio network stream.

I'm rather late to the party with this. I have a Cambridge Audio NP30, and I've been trying to get around the BBC's decision to drop all their streams except for the HLS/DASH streams, which as it stands the NP30 and other CA 'legacy' players cannot play. CA have just recently announced that they will not be issuing firmware updates to these players to support this. Thanks a bunch, CA/BBC.

I have however (after a fair amount of headbanging and with a lot of help from a buddy who's here on the forum, MDF) successfully set up minimserver and minimstreamer on my laptop such that the NP30 can stream the new BBC HLS feeds, transcoded to MP3@320kbps.

I'd been disheartened by various posts such as the above on this forum that suggested older CA players like the NP30 couldn't be used to play live streams via minimserver because it sends byte-range requests - I now suspect that this is only an issue when trying to use the NP30 as a UPnP client, which it is for audio files, or playlists of audio files, but not for live streams, for which it has to be treated as an internet radio.

It's been suggested that on some later models the byte-range request issue is no longer a problem, but I think the byte-range request problem, or something else, still stands if one tries to play a radio stream via the Music Library on the NP30 - that definitely didn't work for me. If I clicked on an item in the BBC Radio playlist under the Minimserver UPnP entry it just blinked and moved through the queue until it found something it could play, if anything, which I'm guessing means it gave up as soon as it didn't get a response to its byte-range request, and moved along until it found something for which it did get a response, i.e. a straight audio file.

What I eventually concluded was that the NP30 only deals with radio streams through the Radio part of its interface. So it was a question of manually entering the local minimserver url's as internet radio presets via the browser interface for the NP30, as described by Simon at minimradio.com and in the NP30 manual.

So the NP30 is not a general UPnP renderer, as some units appear to be - the players that MDF uses for instance (Sonos, and Marantz, I think) can all play radio streams in the same way as they play audio file streams, just as part of a playlist or folder structure, using the UPnP interface, which caused us to get a bit lost for a while as I was following his lead - until I clocked that the NP30 didn't work that way.

Consequently, although via the NP30's Music Library one can play all kinds of codecs - wav, mp3, aac, flac, etc. - via the Radio aspect it's only set up to play mp3, as far as I can tell. So transcoding the aac streams to mp3@320kbps works fine (and sounds great).

Next step is to set all this up on a Raspberry Pi so that I don't have to have the laptop on all the time. Simon asked me to post this after a short private discussion in which I explained all the above. I hope this helps anyone with an NP30 or similar Cambridge Audio 'legacy' player, or indeed just an internet radio, to get around the BBC HLS/DASH issue.

[rpmoore]

Gosh, yes nearly 8 years late to the party!

I now have a Naim streamer that does everything natively.

[FakePlasticDunk]

(27-02-2023 16:40)rpmoore Wrote:  Gosh, yes nearly 8 years late to the party!

I now have a Naim streamer that does everything natively.

Ha ha, yes, so it goes eh? The Naim sounds nice. The possibility of upgrading to a new bit of kit was there in the back of my mind if I hit an impassable road block, but although the solution requires a little outlay, just under £100 all told, it's not as much as I'd have to lay out for a new unit, and I'm otherwise still mostly happy with the NP30. So I'm pleased, and I've learnt some new stuff. And some more things to learn with the whole Raspberry Pi/Linux thing.

I figured best put the story here because when I was searching for answers on the forum this was where I got to and thought I was screwed, so anyone who searches subsequently along similar lines should hopefully see the reply and take succour from it!

Cheers,
Duncan

[amsub]

Once Cambridge Audio confirmed they weren't offering any solution to the impending loss of BBC Shoutcast streams other than using a Bluetooth adaptor to convert my NP30 essentially into a BT speaker I looked around for other options and quickly found MinimStreamer and this thread. Thanks to the hard work done by others, including FPD, setting up my Synology NAS was quick and straightforward. The step that held me for longest was adding the URLs to the NP30's preset list as my manual stated that I needed register the player with the Stream Magic portal which is no longer available. However CA helpfully pointed me to this link https://casupport.cambridgeaudio.com/en/...onnect-app

So now I can continue listening to all the DAB only stations which I can't receive OTA where I live.

[FakePlasticDunk]

That's good to hear! Yes, the Stream Portal approach was dropped a while back, and so the hard-copy manual is out of date, I'd forgotten about that - sorry if that was what threw you. At some point I must have asked CA how to add URL's as presets as I'd already been doing that for some stations by the time Minimserver was recommended to me - fortunately once you know that you just have to type your NP30's IP address into a browser it's all fairly self-explanatory.

[amsub]

No need to apologise - I downloaded a copy of the manual from the CA site yesterday and this still refers to the Stream Magic Portal method! I raised a support ticket with CA and they answered within 24 hours so all sorted pretty quickly. It's more interesting to have a few minor issues along the way - if only in terms of learning more. Most importantly, your post had given me the confidence that I was heading in the right direction.

[FakePlasticDunk]

Thanks - that's a bit rubbish, that they didn't update the online manual! But at least CA support were helpful. I've been appraising them of the results of our various tests, as their engineers seemed to believe that the NP30 would play live streams in pretty much every format in which it plays audio files, which it manifestly doesn't, and they've been appreciative and friendly. I'm really pleased this thread and my post helped you out.

[simoncn]

I have edited the last few posts to remove large amounts of redundant quoted text. This makes the forum very hard to read.

When replying to a post, don't just click the Reply button. Instead, you can click the New Reply button to reply without quoting. If some quoting is essential to avoid confusion (for example, when many people have posted comments to the same thread), click Reply and edit the quoted text down to the bare mininum required to identify the post or comment to which you are replying.

[FakePlasticDunk]

Thanks Simon - noted.