New to Minimserver - a few questions

[winxi]

(03-05-2013 18:53)simoncn Wrote:  

(03-05-2013 18:19)bbrip Wrote:  I am not sure caching of covers is a job for the Server? I would have thought its for the control point to do that. Songbook Lite is caching covers and it works extremely well (certainly for me .

LUMIN on the other hand "caches" the entire audio library which is also a concept I very much like.

bbrip

I agree, and I hope server resizing will provide enough performance improvement that server caching isn't required. We'll find out when MinimServer supports resizing....

Edit: To clarify, server-side caching (if supported) would be only for thumbnails. MinimServer always serves full-resolution images directly from the original files.

I think that if an audio server provides resizing album art to thumbnails, caching the thumbnails is unavoidable. Even though there exist fast image resampling algorithms, there is a lot of data involved. Just consider a situation when a control point requests a thousand or more items at once, each having high resolution embedded album art. Such a situation can not be handled properly with 'resizing on the fly', especially on a NAS device with little resources. This may the reason why almost every UPnP audio server which provides image resizing caches the thumbnails.

As for caching the whole library (including tags), I think that this makes the whole server/client concept with UPnP streaming obsolete. Of course, such a control point offers various possibilities, being not restricted by the UPnP protocol. However, there may arise problems with synchronizing for example. It's surely a matter of taste, but I prefer the most generic way of a good server software in combination with a good control point software, having all the nice features from both worlds.