BBC radio streams not working

[simoncn]

(20-02-2015 22:20)PhilD Wrote:  I've had the chance to play now and managed to recreate the dropouts, making the following observations:

1) If I stream from the pi to either Logitech Media Server (LMS) or the i83 alone, everything works perfectly. I can monitor the buffer on the i83 and it remains full 99% of the time with only tiny dips from time to time.

2) If I stream to LMS then start streaming to the i83 I get frequent dropouts on the i83 but LMS continues to play perfectly. The buffer on the i83 constantly fluctuates, reaching 0 a couple of times per minute. If I stop streaming to LMS the i83 dropouts and buffer fluctuations continue.

3) If I stream to the i83 and then start streaming to LMS both play perfectly. The i83 buffer behaves the same as in scenario 1) above.

A final observation, both LMS and the i83 are a few seconds out of sync, with LMS leading.

Hope this is of some help in the diagnostics. Let me know if you'd like me to try anything else.

Thanks,

Phil

Thanks very much for investigating this so thoroughly. I think I understand what is happening. The problem is related to different internal buffer sizes for the i83 and LMS and (I think) insufficient internal buffering in MinimStreamer to handle this client buffer size difference when serving the same internet stream to multiple clients simultaneously.

I think you could work around the problem by stopping LMS streaming to give the i83 a chance to fill its buffer, then restarting LMS after a few seconds.

For a proper fix, I think a change to MinimStreamer buffering might solve this problem. I don't have the necessary equipment to reproduce the problem here. Would you be able to try a test build of MinimStreamer and let me know what happens?

Many thanks for letting me know about this.