Roberts 93i Stream and BBC High Definition Streams

[Steve]

Hi.

I am new to both MinimServer and MinimStreamer, so if I'm asking obvious questions, please remember this.

I am running MinimServer & MininStreamer on a Synology DS215j Nas.

I have a Roberts 93i Stream radio in the home office I have at the end of the garden - sounds posh, but really its a just a nice shed!!!

Everything is Ethernet wired - including the radio.

Setting up MinimServer and MinimStreamer was a breeze - using the packages from within the Synology to set up Java and then Mininserver was easy - even for someone as new to all this media streaming as I am.

I wanted to use MinimServer and MinimSreamer to get the high definition radio feeds from the BBC to the Roberts 93i Stream radio.

I decided to follow the route of using MinimServer to transcode the high res streams and then "simply" use the Music Player mode in the Roberts radio to find the MinimServer via the Shared Media menu options, rather than trying to configure everything as an "Internet Radio" feed.

For a first attempt this just seemed to be an easier option, rather than having to set fixed IP addresses, set up new stations in the Radio-Frontier portal... etc etc.

So, I followed the instructions on streaming the BBC feeds on the MinimStreamer - using this link:

For information about playing BBC HLS streams on other UPnP renderers, see this page.

Literally, 10 minutes later, I had it working, and sat quite smugly in my office/manshed listening to BBS Radio 2.

Initially, at first try, non of the streams worked, but as advised I changed the stream.transcode to *:L16 and bingo, BBC Radio started to play through the Roberts Radio!!

Happy Days!

I had a play, deleted some of the stations in the playlist (using textedit - I'm on a Mac) - all OK.

I renamed some of the streams - all OK.

I got cover (I thought) - I changed the MinimServer display name to Radio, the playlist name to BBC and set up a second playlist with all the Absolute Radio Ogg Vorbis streams. I called this playlist... Absolute.

All OK.

I can use the Music Player mode in the Roberts Radio to get BBC High Res feeds, Absolute High Res feeds via the MinimServer (now showing as Radio) by deciding which playlist to go into and selecting which radio station I want to listen to - all so easy.

As a side, I have on the Synology all my CD's ripped as Flac files and I can get to these by following the Synology menu route in the Shared Media instead of the Radio (i.e. MinimServer) menu route, so all is easy and done without actually having to change the radio mode to Internet Radio.

Then, I decided to look a little deeper into things, and this is what I cannot understand.

I have not changed the URL's from the playlist that can be downloaded from the MinimStreamer page, so the BBC feeds are the high definition streams.

I can see from the Roberts Radio that it is seeing the streams as having a bit rate of 1536 kbps, a Codec of PCM, but doesn't show the sampling rate.

1536 kbps - wow, must be good me thinks.

I decided to see what happens if I changed the stream.transcode to *:MP3, just for fun.

The Roberts Radio nows shows the stream as having a bit rate of 128 kbps, a Codec of MP3 and sampling rate of 48.0 kHz.

I'm now sad!!! I expected to see 320 kbps as I thought this was what the high definition feeds should be getting up to.

128 kbps MP3 is the same as the low definition feeds I can already get through the Internet Radio mode.

So, the questions I have are:

1. Why does PCM show 1536 kbps, but MP3 only show 128 kbps?
2. Am I actually getting High Definition - it sounds no different to the standard definition Internet Radio feeds?
3. What do I need too change?
4. Artist and Album show "Not Specified" - via the normal internet radio mode there is a description showing "The UK's most listened to radio station" and Genre showing as "Variety", Country as "London United Kingdom" - can something be done to change this?

I seem to be almost there - I am really happy with the way things are accessed and structured on the Roberts Radio, I've had great fun getting there... but I don't seem to be getting high res.

Interestingly enough - it's the same results with the Absolute Radio feeds as well.

Help!