Help required to stream BBC Radio to Sonore Rendu, using Bubble UPnP controller

[DavidL]

(02-05-2015 21:27)simoncn Wrote:  

(02-05-2015 10:06)DavidL Wrote:  After experimenting with transcoding options I found:
1) All BBC radio channels play OK on the local renderer
2) With no transcoding by ffmpeg or transcoding *:wav or *:wav24, playback lasts about 2 seconds i.e. the 'pause' symbol remains for about 2 sec until the 'play' symbol reappears
3) With transcoding "*:mp3" playback lasts for between 12 and 30 seconds.

Any further thoughts?
P.S. I've raised the issue with Sonore as well in case it is a limitation of the Rendu renderer.

It sounds like a renderer issue to me. Do you see any message in the MinimServer log when the playback stops?

Can you try playing a native mp3 steam such as Linn Classical on the Rendu (without transcoding) to see whether that works OK? See this section for details of how to do this.

To answer your questions:
Playing a Linn Classical stream without transcoding worked fine on the Rendu.
I have saved the Debug log for playback without transcoding to the Rendu (file attached).

The suggestion from Sonore to allow playback was to check the 'Use Proxy' box in the Nexus Settings / Local Media Server menu. This had no effect on the playback behaviour.

After much experimentation with transcoding in MinimServer / MinimStreamer I believe I have solved the problem.
As noted above with no transcoding or with transcoding *:wav or *:wav24, playback lasted about 2 seconds, however with transcoding "*:mp3" playback lasted for between 12 and 30 seconds.
I therefore tried transcoding with "*:mp3;320k" and playback worked fine for all the BBC stations. As specifying the output bitrate did the trick, I then tried transcoding set to "aac:mp3;320k" and this also gives perfect playback!
Food for thought?

I was reluctant to use this type of transcoding as while there will be no loss of sound quality between lossless formats I believe that re-coding / up-sampling lossy formats could have a negative effect. Any comments?

I've compared the sound quality of the MinimServer streams with that from the same stations on DAB radio and Freeview TV - they are difficult to tell apart even though the bit rates of the latter are lower than 320.