Notices

They were just standard AVI's that mplayer can play, they didn't show up in the menu as videos that could even be played, when I selected the xbox or azureus they just showed empty folders.

I'm yet to install media tomb as i haven't had much time of late.

Cheers
Rip

EDIT:

xbox shows nothing when I select the server (could be xbox setup as I only have n800 as a upnp device in the house aside from the xbox itself running XBMC)

and Az just shows empty folders (but Az can be used as a media server from my xbox client)

Guys, as a developer of Canola-UPnP plugin I have some words to say about UPnP:

"UPnP is a crappy bloated %$#& protocol !! "

So, please, don't blame the servers, don't blame the plugin...
The UPnP specification is very week, basically, any http server can fit in the UPnP specification and that's the reason to have 10000 of servers implementations and only 10 or 15 players.

Anyone can implement a UPnP server (even Microsoft) but nobody can create a player supporting all servers (nobody did) .

If you would like to see a better alternative to share your media, try DMAP, or if you don't agree with me, ask to SONY why they are pushing DLNA (DLNA == UPnP + restrictions)...

We (Canola Team) will try to fix all issues with UPnP but this takes time and we need help, so as soon as possible we will publish the source code of the plugin (developers can get using apt-get source) and every user will be able to do tests with your very special UPnP server :-)

I've got mediatomb working fine with tablet encode with movies I have previously transcoded, but it runs choppy with non-tablet encoded movies, what settings did you use to get mediatomb working with tablet-encode? I'm pretty new to mediatomb and can't seem to get it working at all.

Cheers
Rip

EDIT:

Finally works. yay! with

<transcode mimetype="video/x-msvideo" using="tablet-encode"/>

and in profiles

<profile name="tablet-encode" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/x-msvideo</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept-url>
<first-resource>yes</first-resource>
<accept-ogg-theora>no</accept-ogg-theora>
<agent command="tablet-encode" arguments="-p best %in %out"/>
<buffer size="14400000" chunk-size="512000" fill-size="120000"/>
</profile>

I'm not sure if these are the best settings but it seems to work with the latest stable edition of mediatomb

Ok, so let's finish the whole history, let's try to start again, and dismiss any problems in communications.

Resume :

a. this guy http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...9&postcount=23 posted that mythTV was crashing.

b. I gave him the same answer you're going to receive: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...6&postcount=24

c. you are right, that I didn't look into it, I gave a answer based on history projects not on actual test (this could be my fault) so I could have ended everything here by saying simple : we are not going to support it.

d. you entered and if "I read your statement above about mythTv (first post on this thread) and so on...

e. we went under a flame about this.


---------
So now it's time to look forward, I will measure more carefully my words, sometimes I'm too eager to give fast feedback, and I do mistakes as anyone.

I apologize for sounding like "sending you away" but I do not apologize for not supporting mythTV.

There's one thing that bothers me a lot (not related to you) that I would like people to understand where we try to make the difference:

a. we don;t do dirty hacks.

So, I can assure you there's a couple of hacks we could do to improve the software.
Example : we could kill the non-fullscreen video, and open mplayer fullscreen twice, to avoid : the wrong aspect and the performance. But we chosed not to do so, and then we pay.

So we can indeed make it work (like it's working on the other media players) but it would need a hack (to use gnome things inside our code) or even to create a specific parser for it (not a big deal, but still a specific code) and we are avoiding it. So we will answer the guys from the other media serves indeed, but not going to add support to any of them in particular. That is the whole point : /

But no worries, not hurt feelings then?

Marcelo

Thanks to the Canola team for putting out such a great free application! The new UNPN plugin works with the latest XP SVN of Fuppes. It is also much faster than the first release. I did notice one bug which I haven't investigated deeply. When loading an extremely large directory, it stops loading part way through the alphabet. Anyone else notice this running fuppes on XP?

okay.

regarding (a): I did see that post, and your (b) reply, but I didn't comment at the time.

In fact, MythTV no longer uses a "non-standard" container for videos by default. I assume, here, you're talking about the *.NUV files --they stopped using that container by default after version 0.18 (current version is 0.21, so there have been 3 releases [and 2.5 years] since the *.NUV files were created by default on most MythTV systems). The standard video format is now the raw capture of what the encoder card produces; in most cases it's an MPEG2 stream, as extracted from the VIDEO_TS in the case of satellite and terrestrial cable tuner cards, or MPEG2 as created natively by the analog encoder cards (Hauppauge, etc). There are a few cards out there that will create MP4 files directly, but those cards are relatively uncommon (even though the format, itself, is quite common). The only issue Canola (or any other UPNP product) should encounter is with the bitrate of the encoded video --and that has nothing to do with interpreting the UPNP stream, and everything to do with decoding the video file (and, in Canola's case, Canola isn't doing anything with the video other than sending it off to the media renderer [Media Player or mplayer]).

The problem stated in (a), and reiterated by me in this thread is that the application (Canola, along with the UPNP plug-in) exits immediately upon selecting either the Videos menu item (which can [and in my case, does] contain a list of transcoded video at an appropriate bitrate for the Nokia tablets) or the Recordings menu item (which contains [probably; see above] a list of standard MPEG2 video files.

In any case, it's not a problem with MythTV using a "non-standard" video container in which to store the video, because a) they don't use that format anymore, in most cases, and b) we're not even at the point of trying to play anything yet --we're still looking for a list of what's there. If Canola can successfully get the list of audio files from the Music section, it should be equally capable of getting the list of Video or Recording items in those sections. This particular issue has nothing to do with what format the video files are stored in; the failure occurs well before that point in the process. I don't know if there's a fundamental difference in the response sent via UPNP when one selects Videos or Recordings, versus the response sent when one selects Music. If you'd like, I'd be happy to run some code (if you have any) to capture the first few kilobytes of returned information for each of these menu selections, and you can determine if there's an issue with the server sending a fundamentally different UPNP stream for those two choices than it's sending for the Music choice...

Regarding (c), you said, "I gave a answer based on history projects not on actual test". To this I can only reiterate what I said above regarding the "non-standard" video container files. Also, please note that UPNP was added to MythTV in version 0.20, well after the *.nuv video container was (largely) dropped... so I don't see how you could have used a UPNP-enabled version of MythTV that was squirting out *.nuv files in your testing, unless you had a very non-standard MythTV installation.

And, I don't think anyone here is asking for that. If Canola can read and understand the UPNP data sent when selecting Music, then it logically follows that it should also be able to read and understand the UPNP data sent when selecting Video or Recordings -- regardless of whether it'll be able to play any/all of the presented items once the list is displayed. Right now, Canola is not behaving well with either of the video selections... even if it doesn't understand what it's being sent, it probably shouldn't crash/exit... I would expect some sort of "unknown error" dialog or message box to be displayed. Whether or not Canola ever works with any specific media server, it should gracefully handle situations where it might receive something it didn't expect, and not segfault and/or crash and close the application.

Again, if you have some tool that will allow me to capture the UPNP data stream that is sent, I would gladly gather together some testing/evaluation files for you guys to look at.

I am using windows media player (upnp media share) as the media server, and canola with upnp plugin for the client. I can only see divx.avi files if I change the file extension to .mpgs on the media server. If I don't change the extension, they will not show up at all in canola.

Any ideas?

yok : divx are not supported. You can try using another enconding on the server or some transconding to better formats (better to the tablet playback I mean) than divX.

Marcelo

Hi Briand:

yeah I agree with you that the crashing bug is unnaceptabble , and at least an error should be thrown. I think I didn't noticed that I needed to say
"yeah, we are going to look at this CRASH" but I kept saying "we are not going to support mythTV"

I think this shows where the mess began, I was not "blaming" but actually I was running from the responsibility of testing with mythTV. If we are breaking it's our fault. period. It will be fixed.

I think Chenca is preparing the upnp code, with it and the the development build you can do the tracing, and I will let you know more about our things with mythTv when Artur comes back of his vacations I think the clearest point here is that I shouldn't have said that without his approval

Marcelo

Does unsupported just mean not offically supported (take your own risk)? Because I can get xvid videos under an avi container to play by changing extension from avi to mpg.

Also on the Canola site where it states supported format, MP4 is listed. So I assume divx/xvid is supported on local playback, but not over upnp plugin?