Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

I get that in fuppes and Orb using the Canola UPnP plugin too. In fuppes, I could see the music while the db was updating, but after it was done I saw nothing. Also, the directories show up but there are no files.

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

I guess you use this server with other hardware/software, is it working okay there? Also probably you're aware ushare can't do transcoding.

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

@Navi: my Orb is completely empty, but that's probably due to a specific implementation.

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

Hey guys, We don't support ushare by now, but if needed we will include it on the list. But be aware that due to a main difference, if the server has some particular details in the implementation it may be difficult to support it correctly (we don't use gnomeVFS to download-play the media like mediastreamer)

BR

MArcelo

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

Okay... I did read (above) what you said regarding MythTV, but I installed the UPNP plugin and tried it out, anyway.

...and, I don't totally agree with what you said about MythTV -- some (mostly older) installations use non-standardized (at least outside of the MythTV community) video containers, but for the most part the video file on the disk is directly from the encoder, meaning it's most likely to be either an MPEG2 or an MPEG4 file. I would hardly call either of them non-standard

okay... so, I fired up Canola after installing the plugin, and saw the Media Servers option on the main menu. clicked it, and got a list of media servers. In my case, the sole entry on the list was my MythTV (0.21/svn) AV Media Server. I clicked on that item, and was presented with three choices: Music, Recordings, and Videos.

I tried Music first.

I was given the option of looking at the music by Album or All. What? Where are my "published" playlists? (No, I'm not expecting support for the MythMusic "Smart Playlists", but I do think I should be able to pick from my static playlists). I don't have my mp3 files organized by album, so I chose to view all.

You need to put feedback on these screens, Marcelo. I stared at a non-responsive Canola screen with no indication that anything was going on while my MythTV box (apparently) sent over a list of songs. I kept staring, with nothing (apparent) happening for about 20 minutes. The only reason I didn't power-cycle the N800 was that I saw a periodic blinking of the "wireless status" LED on my WAP across the room; so I waited. and waited. and waited.

Eventually, I was shown a list of music. Each and every one of the 22,429 [an increase of 55 since last week!] mp3 files currently on my MythTV system are painstakingly tagged with Title, Artist, and Year (but not 'Album', since.. well.. these are not albums, they are released singles [and, in some cases, were never even on an album!]), and this information was slurped up by the import process in MythTV when the songs were added to the system. Certainly not for lack of data, all that is displayed in Canola is the Song Title. No artist, no year, no genre.

...and, then Canola started playing the first song on the list. It continued to play through the list, and I could go back to the list and click on a different song, and it would start from there and sequence forward. No, I didn't listen to all 22,000+ songs!

Summary:

Feedback. You definitely need to tell the user what's going on, lest they start believing nothing is going on!

Don't assume that music collections are grouped by "albums"; they're not. Further, an "album" doesn't necessarily contain only songs by a given artist. It'd be nice to be able to pick an artist, and get a list of all the songs (regardless of "album") by that artist. :)

I don't know what order the huge list of songs is in... it's not alphabetical by title, artist, or chronological by year. Perhaps it's unsorted? ...in whatever order they were added to my MythTV box?


Next, I tried video:

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

...and here's where the [short] fun began.

I clicked on Recordings, and Canola crashed and disappeared. I restarted Canola and tried again; clicked on Recordings, and Canola crashed and disappeared. I rebooted the N800, restarted Canola, and tried again; clicked on Recordings, and Canola crashed and disappeared. No pause, no hesitation, no list of available titles, just bye-bye!.

I rebooted the tablet again.

In Canola again, I tried the Videos option in the Media Server plugin. The videos on my system are of varying lengths, mostly .avi or .mp4 files; funny commercials, music videos, or full-length television shows (minus commercials, of course!) and movies that I've transcoded and saved. They vary in length from a few minutes to a couple hours, and are sufficiently compressed and at a low enough bitrate so they play nicely on the N800 when copied to an SD card and sneaker-netted to the tablet.

I clicked on Videos, and Canola crashed and disappeared. I restarted Canola and tried again; clicked on Videos, and Canola crashed and disappeared. I rebooted the N800, restarted Canola, and tried again; clicked on Videos, and Canola crashed and disappeared. No pause, no hesitation, no list of available titles, just bye-bye!.

Summary:

It didn't work.

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

ok, so you know what's coming next :) we have almost 3 years of maemo-mythTV experience :) so we would do if we believe in it. Anyhow I will answer some of your points..

I was given the option of looking at the music by Album or All. What? Where are my "published" playlists? (No, I'm not expecting support for the MythMusic "Smart Playlists", but I do think I should be able to pick from my static playlists). I don't have my mp3 files organized by album, so I chose to view all.
[quote]
If they are not appearing, they are not published as they should be in the UPNP protocol, so sorry, we will not support particular implementations of mythTV.

In this point I agree with you. I have a list of at least 30 spots where feedback is missing. But developers don't think like me, they want bug free stuff first, tested then we added the "plus". But anyhow:

We do not support mythTV. In a default upnp server, the little loading ball is rotating, and even on HUGE lists we do lazy loadings (thanks to chenca) that starts to show you songs as they appear, so we have (with more than 6 different softwares as servers, in windows linux e macs with more than 15k songs) faced a 5 min wait without items on the screen. I would say even more, we didn't wait 1 minute at all.

So probably you are already figuring out that MythTV is "screwing" up the protocol sending what it thinks it should send. (ok, I will be more careful because we maybe the problem... but this is my guess)

Now my question: so the other servers do show it :) and they are using standard(almost) upnp. who do you think is messing up with stuff here?
Dude, we receive items from the network. Dictionaries with values. If there's not a value, mythTV is sending in a different way.

At least the URI for the file was correct.

Summary:

Don't get me wrong. But don't think after all this months of defending the user, and being the lead designer, and talking about that HERE, in my site and in the Canola channel this was not thought of? Of course it is, and we are adding them, changing text trying to come up with improved feedback in the speed that we can. Still more than 30 spots needing it? Still! but it's not magic to add everything when you don't have the man power. I know it's a difficult choice, but either to place the features that were delayed (like UPNP) or to add feeedback to everything and release a non-incremental beta just (this beta is all about feedback).
I did my home work, got a new team to keep canola going, and they are being trained etc etc. so this improvements are not on the polish phase (beta10). Upnp was the last feature and now we can do the improvements on the details.

I don't assume, and on UPNP I can do nothing. We don't do nothing on upnp. It's the media server that indexes organizes and sends a list. We show the list. that's it.

on the media library, I will tell you something about the users also: Don't assume that you know what they do. My real users even don't know about this forum, they send emails on the website. They do use albums as organization methods, but even with that I do not assume that. That's why in the music collection (where we have control) we pick from artists, then album. But I agree with you, one thing present in canola 1 is missing since the beta1 in canola2: "all songs". When you have groups of the same " artists " - the albums - you have this option of seeing all the items.

But in the UPNP? we don't have nothing to do with that. The server must have it.
So, if you have a standard upnp server, and your collection is there, just enable it that if you provide artists-album or all song it will appear.

ask MythTV dude. :)

Marcelo

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

...and here's where the [short] fun began.
so you probably have noticed by now how good mythTV is in the standards and why we don't support it.

again: if this happens with the mythTV, what do you think it's the reason :)
Not following the protocol.

My Summary: it will not Work. and with the community that mythTV has (if you knew how unpolite the lead developers of mythTV can be) we are the ones who are never going to try to help them. As we did with several upnp servers with problems in the past.

BR

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

Resumption of a paused podcast restarts the podcast :-(
Not running multiple applications.

Re: Canola beta9 UPNP (0.1.0 Alpha Release) Known issues, Bugs Feedback! Please Test
 

Hmm. Okay, then. You don't wish to support MythTV - one of the largest, most heavily developed, open source multimedia applications on Linux, and choose instead to place any faults solely with that application rather than consider that your fledgling plug-in may need some work. I'm sorry you feel this way. I don't plan on building up a Microsoft-based Media Center or buy some commercial off-the-shelf multimedia solution with UPNP support, just to test these issues in your plug-in and determine where the problem(s) may be.

PS: I've been running a MythTV system, continuously, since version 0.13, and I do, in fact, know several of the developers (lead and otherwise) on the MythTV team... in fact, there's bits of my own code in there.