Windows Media Player parsing UPnP tree

[gillecaluim]

After installing minimserver on centos and pointing minimserver to a large audio library containing flac encoded audio files the WMP see's the collection but when it tries to scan the library it apparently doesn't properly traverse the file tree and never ends adding songs.....it ran for over 8 hours and told me i had over 3000 hours of songs and counting

Is this a problem with windows reading the flac file tags ( i installed the xiph.org codecs) or a problem with the interaction between minimserver upnp protocol and wmp?

[simoncn]

(21-05-2013 19:47)gillecaluim Wrote:  After installing minimserver on centos and pointing minimserver to a large audio library containing flac encoded audio files the WMP see's the collection but when it tries to scan the library it apparently doesn't properly traverse the file tree and never ends adding songs.....it ran for over 8 hours and told me i had over 3000 hours of songs and counting

Is this a problem with windows reading the flac file tags ( i installed the xiph.org codecs) or a problem with the interaction between minimserver upnp protocol and wmp?

It's a design issue with WMP. See note 5 of this section.

The problem is that WMP assumes the library is a strict hierarchy where every song appears exactly once. With MinimServer, the library is a directed graph in which a song can appear multiple times because it's available via multiple navigation paths (such as Genre->Artist->Composer, Artist->Composer, Composer->Artist, etc., etc.) WMP treats all these paths to the same song as if they were different songs, attempts to preload all these different "songs" from the server, and runs out of resources.

[gillecaluim]

(21-05-2013 22:45)simoncn Wrote:  

(21-05-2013 19:47)gillecaluim Wrote:  After installing minimserver on centos and pointing minimserver to a large audio library containing flac encoded audio files the WMP see's the collection but when it tries to scan the library it apparently doesn't properly traverse the file tree and never ends adding songs.....it ran for over 8 hours and told me i had over 3000 hours of songs and counting

Is this a problem with windows reading the flac file tags ( i installed the xiph.org codecs) or a problem with the interaction between minimserver upnp protocol and wmp?

It's a design issue with WMP. See note 5 of this section.

The problem is that WMP assumes the library is a strict hierarchy where every song appears exactly once. With MinimServer, the library is a directed graph in which a song can appear multiple times because it's available via multiple navigation paths (such as Genre->Artist->Composer, Artist->Composer, Composer->Artist, etc., etc.) WMP treats all these paths to the same song as if they were different songs, attempts to preload all these different "songs" from the server, and runs out of resources.

so....is there a work around? or use a different upnp media player

[simoncn]

(21-05-2013 23:43)gillecaluim Wrote:  so....is there a work around? or use a different upnp media player

There is no workaround. See this section for some suggested alternative UPnP control points. My preferred Windows control point is Linn Kinsky.

[bubbleguuum]

(22-05-2013 04:11)simoncn Wrote:  

(21-05-2013 23:43)gillecaluim Wrote:  so....is there a work around? or use a different upnp media player

There is no workaround. See this section for some suggested alternative UPnP control points. My preferred Windows control point is Linn Kinsky.

WMP 12 will crawl a media server recursively only if it does not handle this search request:

upnp:class derivedfrom "object.item.audioItem" and @refID exists false

So the workaround it to hardcode support for this search request and return a flat list of tracks.

JRMC does the same thing although IIRC it will not crawl recursively and emits this search request instead:

(upnp:class derivedfrom "object.item.audioItem.musicTrack")

[simoncn]

(23-05-2013 10:06)bubbleguuum Wrote:  WMP 12 will crawl a media server recursively only if it does not handle this search request:

upnp:class derivedfrom "object.item.audioItem" and @refID exists false

So the workaround it to hardcode support for this search request and return a flat list of tracks.

JRMC does the same thing although IIRC it will not crawl recursively and emits this search request instead:

(upnp:class derivedfrom "object.item.audioItem.musicTrack")

Thanks for this information. I'll put this on the list of things to add in a future release.

[simoncn]

(23-05-2013 16:17)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for this information. I'll put this on the list of things to add in a future release.

I've implemented these two hard-coded search queries and I've confirmed that this enables MinimServer to work with both WMP and JRiver. This support will be available in the next release. Many thanks to bubbleguuum for letting me know about this.

Because WMP and JRiver are loading a flat list of tracks from MinimServer, the browse trees are created by WMP and JRiver, not by MinimServer. This means you don't get the "intelligent browsing" capabilities that MinimServer provides when used with a standard UPnP control point.