Monday 4 February 2013

An alternative lower layer

At the weekend, I went to that there London. A friend had his house all set up with Skifta a DLNA compliant integration thingy. Some initial thoughts on that platform made for interesting crossover with what SCANPI is already doing for me.

  1. Playing Music is all good and works with his DLNA compliant Blu-ray player.
  2. Having to scroll through all his various attached devices took ages - perhaps a single consolidated view of all music across all devices would make sense.
  3. Selecting what to play from multiple devices (Android tablet + phone) = last one wins.
  4. Queueing - very frustrating that there is no way to locally (i.e. on the current browsing device) queue up a number of items to play.
  5. Feedback - the currently playing track is shown, but nothing about how long is left / has played / etc is available on the tablet Skifta service. The phone's internal DLNA media controller did have this information.
  6. We couldn't find a way to get the MP3 or M3U versions of export from SCANPI to push to the currently selected Blu-ray player

Short summary: I need to read more about http://www.dlna.org/ and perhaps copy and paste some stuff to make a SCANPI installed PI a compliant device? (BOTH a device which knows about content AND a device to which content can be sent/played).

1 comment:

  1. Turns out I should have read more BEFORE posting. Bubble UPnP seems to be a much better view, browse / pick, queueing service. Further reading:
    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp&hl=en, http://blog.scphillips.com/2013/01/using-a-raspberry-pi-with-android-phones-for-media-streaming/, http://www.bubblesoftapps.com/bubbleupnpserver/, http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/ and http://openhome.org/

    ReplyDelete