A want for selective transcoding for Yamaha WXA 50

[rich28]

Hi, I hope someone can help. While the WXA 50 does an OK job in terms of FLACs, WAV and ALACs, I’ve been unable to get the device to play m3u’s of internet radio stations and have a big a want for it to be able to handle BBC MPEG Dash or HLS streams. And, I’m keen for it to provide better support for mp3 formatted files…

I’m struggling to find the best MinimStreamer settings to achieve this. I initial thought that I could use the sample settings for the BBC MPEG Dash or HLS streams, but I don’t get any output from the device with either of these. I have got things to work using *:wav24, though if I get it right this transcodes everything to WAV, including my flac files which already play OK. Please can anyone help me out?

[simoncn]

The '*' in '*:wav24' doesn't mean "everything". It means network streams of unspecified type (see this section). The BBC DASH and HLS streams are network streams and they are of unspecified type if the .m3u #EXTINF line for them doesn't specify a stream type (see this section). So your FLAC files and any other local files are not beng transcoded by the *:wav24 setting.

[rich28]

Thanks for your quick response Simon and apologies that I'm only just getting back to you now.

I've had some success with getting this WXA 50 to play radio streams, aided by using Bubble UPnP Server. If enable Bubble UPnP Server to configure the device as an OpenHome renderer and I use Kazoo as a control point I can play the BBC MPEG-DASH radio streams, when the stream type (in the m3u playlist) is 'wav' and stream.transcode is 'aac:wav'.

However, my real want is to play this MPEG-DASH stream from the Musiccast app, which sadly isn't OpenHome compliant. My (MinimServer) music server is available from the app, and while I can use this to play to any of its locally stored content, it refuses to play the BBC MPEG-DASH radio stream I referred to earlier, or indeed any other m3u playlists comprising radio streams to that matter. Am I possibly missing something in MinimStreamer, which potentially could enable this?

[simoncn]

You should not be setting the stream type in the m3u playlist to wav. This should be set to aac (the stream type sent by the server). Fixing this might solve the problem with MusicCast.

The other thing that might help is setting the streamSize option in the stream.options property. For example, you could set stream.options to streamSize=2GB.

[rich28]

Thanks Simon, no joy though. I've modified things to reflect your suggestions and for a nano second it seems that Musiccast may work, but very quickly it then displays an unable to play message.

I've discovered that Bubble UPnP Server seems to provide a solution to this issue, if I get it to provide a proxy of my music server and then access this via the Musiccast app. However, this outputs the BBC MPEG-DASH radio stream at L16 41khz not 48khz, and I'm unsure whether using a combination of this and MinimServer for transcoding duties is a tad excessive for my DS118 Synology NAS.

[simoncn]

This suggests that you could solve the problem by setting the stream type in the m3u playlist to aac:48000 and setting transcoding in stream.transcode to aac:L16. You should also be able to remove the streamSize option. This will leave the stream in its original 48 kHz format.

[rich28]

I followed your guidance again Simon and I'm very pleased to say all is working now - many thanks for all your help! Its great that I can now play radio streams, including the MPEG-DASH BBC ones, directly from the Musiccast app.

Having said that, I will keep this WXA 50 configured as an openhome renderer (c/o Bubble UPnP Server) and will continue to use Kazoo or Bubble DS as a control point as well, since this brings a number of significant benefits, including a library search capability, which annoyingly isn't possible from the Musiccast app.