Car gateway

[Michel Lopez]

(06-01-2016 12:05)simoncn Wrote:  The part I am missing is a high-level overview of what the components are in the original car audio system (UPnP server/control point/renderer, Windows Media Player, ???) and which of these components you are trying to change in order to produce the MinimServer-based setup.

In fact I am using 2 different & disconnected environments. Sorry if this was not clear from my previous post.

On one side I am using some sort of regular setup based on MinimServer/MinimStreamer running on a Raspberry Pi setup with Raspbian Jessie, and some tools and players on a Windows PC, to evaluate, prototype & test all the settings and tools.

On the other side, and of course completely disconnected, there is the car setup.This type of car do have an on-board Wi-Fi hotspot, using a Sim card installed in the car (no external phone involved to create the networking environment). As usual for cars, this is some sort of closed box, as almost no settings are exposed. In this context the 'normal' use is just to get a device (Iphone or Android with or without a Sim card), to be connected to the car WiFi and run the Audi app. Then the car on screen system let you select a WiFi audio source (= an UPnP server) and will list the audio content of the Audi app. This could be the music stored locally in the device and of course the radio streams provided by the app (full list and favorites).

So what I am trying to do is really to use MinimServer/MinimStreamer, running on a Raspberry Pi connected to the WiFi connection from the car to 'replace' the Audi app that is in fact an UPnP server. This is of course to make the content available to the on-board player that is an UPnP control point/renderer.

(06-01-2016 13:13)simoncn Wrote:  MinimServer is setting the UPnP class for a radio stream to 'object.item.audioItem.audioBroadcast' as defined in the UPnP ContentDirectory specification. It seems that the Audi server is setting the UPnP class to 'object.item.audioItem.musicTrack'. This seems to be what is causing the AV Media Controller tool to report an unknown type (the ? symbol). However, it is not preventing this stream from playing for me in WMP 11 on my Windows 7 PC. Can you try playing the stream in WMP 11 on a Windows PC to confirm whether this is working for you?

It is possible to make MinimServer send the stream as a musicTrack instead of an audioBroadcast. You might like to try this on the car renderer. To do this, you can edit the '-1' duration in the playlist to some other value (for example, 120 for a 2-minute duration) and then do a MinimServer rescan.

This is one of the tweaks I tried very early in my tests, but in that case the MinimStreamer content is not exposed to the car player, even if it works ok with Windows Media Player. In my previous attempts (not this one), I sort of forced the radio playlist to become visible to the player by also including a regular mp3 file to the shared folder, but that seems to be strange anyway.

For example, I am using this playlist :
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:300,[E1;mp3] Europe 1
http://mp3lg4.tdf-cdn.com/9240/lag_180945.mp3

In this case, the car player find as expected the UPnP server, but then just display that there is no content available. I tried storing the playlist at the root level and also in a sub folder, but did not see any difference.

Please find attached the MinimServer log in one file with logging set to debug and another with the logging set to trace, of my an attempt to access to the MinimServer/MinimStreamer content from the car player, configured with just the playlist mentioned in this post.

As previously said, I do have validated, in the car configuration, that this setup works with some regular music content stored in the Raspberry Pi.

Thanks,

-Michel