BBC radio streams not working

[Pastim]

(20-02-2015 00:23)simoncn Wrote:  

(20-02-2015 00:15)Pastim Wrote:  See http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entr..._121434789 - I hope it's not too incorrect or misleading. If it is please correct it or tell me what you'd like me to say.

This looks good. Thanks very much!

Quote:I don't really understand the distinction you are making since many, if not most, Internet Radios are also UPnP clients aren't they? Following your instructions on minimradio seems to work for my UPnP renderers so I don't quite see what the issue is.

There is a big difference between playing a local file of known length and playing an unbounded network stream. Many players that support the former via their UPnP interface don't support the latter via their UPnP interface. Using the custom radio URL approach guarantees that the latter will work.

Quote:See also my notes on aac: transcoding not seeming to work for me.

See my recent response. I think you have probably been using the wrong approach by hand-editing generated URLs. This is likely to fail because the MIME type of the stream won't match the altered URL.

We definitely have our wires crossed. What 'hand-edited' URLs are you talking about? I'm not even sure what you mean by that. Hand-edited where?

I shall try to be as clear as I can.

I go to vtuner and add stations using your format:

Code:

http://192.168.1.10:9790/minimstreamer/*/R3

and so on.

I left my BBC_Radio.m3u as before, starting with:

Code:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1,[*R1;aac] BBC Radio 1
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8
#EXTINF:-1,[*R1X;aac] BBC Radio 1Xtra
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_1xtra.m3u8

etc.

I go to my player, select Internet Radio, and the vtuner station name I assigned and play it.

OK?

[Pastim]

(20-02-2015 00:26)simoncn Wrote:  

(20-02-2015 00:22)Pastim Wrote:  I was, in all cases, using the player's own menu to select Internet Radio stations that have been coded into 'added stations' in vtuner. I was not using any UPnP Control Point, nor the player's Media Server menus.

Thanks for clarifying this. In this case, you should be following the MinimRadio instructions. These don't mention adding /$!stream.aac or using aac:wav transcoding.

Both our responses were made at the same time - sorry.

However, I'm still a little puzzled. If I had another music source which generated aac, and I needed to transcode it through UPnP (maybe because a UPnP player didn't support aac), would I be unable to?

[Redhanded]

(19-02-2015 23:21)simoncn Wrote:  

(19-02-2015 21:44)Redhanded Wrote:  Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work.

I created the file mentioned on the minim radio page but when I created a Sonos Radio station with URL http://10.0.1.41:9790/minimstreamer/*/R2 the Sonos controller gave the error, unable to play, station not found.

......

so it doesn't seem to be able to find the entry in the BBC Radio.m3u file which is:

#EXTINF:-1,[*R2] BBC Radio 2
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/man...o_two.m3u8

Did you do a MinimServer rescan after creating the new file? This is required to pick up any changes to playlists.

No, I had been restarting minimserver but didn't realise that a rescan was necessary.

I did a rescan and it started working!

[simoncn]

(20-02-2015 00:43)Redhanded Wrote:  No, I had been restarting minimserver but didn't realise that a rescan was necessary.

I did a rescan and it started working!

This is mentioned in the instructions but perhaps I need to give it a bit more prominence.

[PhilD]

(20-02-2015 00:10)simoncn Wrote:  

(19-02-2015 23:46)PhilD Wrote:  I wanted to report that the newest approach is working on my Roberts Stream 83i in 'Internet Radio' mode, making a much more elegant solution than anything else I've found. To achieve this I added the custom url to the Frontier Silicon Radio Portal website. Unfortunately custom streams on the portal don't offer AAC as a stream type but the mp3 option seems to work fine.

On a separate note, I had MinimServer/Streamer/Radio running on a raspberryPi B+ with raspbian but encountered dropouts when multiple clients were accessing the same radio stream. I've now installed everything on a spare net-top and all seems to be running well without dropouts.

Is it reasonable that the pi ran out of grunt with multiple clients accessing the same stream?

Thanks for the hard work and for offering such a neat solution to the BBC's mess.

Phil

I will try this on the Pi. Did you have any transcoding enabled or were the clients using the AAC ADTS stream? How many clients were there?

No, I didn't use encoding. The two clients were the Roberts i83 and Logitech Media Server (acting as a radio streamer). The raspbian was a fresh install with the updated version of ffmpeg installed as described in this post LMS forums.

Thanks again for all your efforts!

Phil

[simoncn]

(20-02-2015 00:36)Pastim Wrote:  Both our responses were made at the same time - sorry.

No problem! I think we are close to resolving the misunderstanding.

Quote:However, I'm still a little puzzled. If I had another music source which generated aac, and I needed to transcode it through UPnP (maybe because a UPnP player didn't support aac), would I be unable to?

You would be able to do this for UPnP renderers by using the stream.transcode property. This creates a URL in a special format with /$!transcode.xxx at the end. Another option is to set a stream type in your .m3u playlist, which creates a URL in a special format with /$!stream.xxx at the end.

These special URL formats are used for MinimStreamer internal purposes only and for the UPnP case only. The '$!' suffixes should not be added by the user. (This is what I meant by hand-editing.) The only supported and tested way to define transcoding settings and stream types is by using the settings mentioned in the previous paragraph and described in the MinimStreamer documentation.

Transcoding is not currently supported when MinimStreamer is being used with a internet radio receiver (the MinimRadio case). It might be possible to make this work if it becomes necessary. This would require designing a user interface to support this, adding suitable user instructions to the documentation, and doing some testing with internet radio receivers.

[simoncn]

(20-02-2015 08:56)PhilD Wrote:  No, I didn't use encoding. The two clients were the Roberts i83 and Logitech Media Server (acting as a radio streamer). The raspbian was a fresh install with the updated version of ffmpeg installed as described in this post LMS forums.

Thanks again for all your efforts!

Phil

I would expect the Raspberry Pi to be able to handle this. I'll set this up over the weekend and see what happens. Which radio stream were you playing?

Edit: Were both clients affected by the problem or only one of them? If it is only one, it would be worth trying stopping and restarting each client to see what happens. I have a theory for a possible cause and if this theory is correct, you might find that restarting the unaffected client clears the problem.

[PhilD]

(20-02-2015 09:17)simoncn Wrote:  

(20-02-2015 08:56)PhilD Wrote:  No, I didn't use encoding. The two clients were the Roberts i83 and Logitech Media Server (acting as a radio streamer). The raspbian was a fresh install with the updated version of ffmpeg installed as described in this post LMS forums.

Thanks again for all your efforts!

Phil

I would expect the Raspberry Pi to be able to handle this. I'll set this up over the weekend and see what happens. Which radio stream were you playing?

Fantastic. I was listening to:

Code:

http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8

No hurry to solve this on my behalf as I now have a stable solution by running on a different computer. However, I would be interested to hear if this is a foible of my set-up or if other people are seeing the same behaviour.

I would also like to seriously complement you on your support - I don't think I've ever used software where responses and solutions are offered so quickly. Thanks for all the help.

Phil

[simoncn]

(20-02-2015 09:37)PhilD Wrote:  No hurry to solve this on my behalf as I now have a stable solution by running on a different computer. However, I would be interested to hear if this is a foible of my set-up or if other people are seeing the same behaviour.

You probably haven't seen the edit I made to my last post. Were both clients affected by the problem or only one of them? If it is only one, it would be worth trying stopping and restarting each client to see what happens. I have a theory for a possible cause and if this theory is correct, you might find that restarting the unaffected client clears the problem. If you could try this, I would appreciate it. Many thanks!

Quote:I would also like to seriously complement you on your support - I don't think I've ever used software where responses and solutions are offered so quickly. Thanks for all the help.

Phil

Thanks very much!

[PhilD]

(20-02-2015 09:47)simoncn Wrote:  You probably haven't seen the edit I made to my last post. Were both clients affected by the problem or only one of them? If it is only one, it would be worth trying stopping and restarting each client to see what happens. I have a theory for a possible cause and if this theory is correct, you might find that restarting the unaffected client clears the problem. If you could try this, I would appreciate it. Many thanks!

Good question, the clients are in different rooms so I only heard the i83 stuttering before stopping the stream. I'm currently at work so I'll try to recreate the problem tonight or over the weekend then report back.

Phil