I've been looking for a long time for the "ideal" media playing system, I settled on Meedio with a dual-monitor setup (one is a small touchscreen), but it has limitations. UPnP/DLNA is now taking off in a big way and this is exactly what I wanted to do 4 years ago!
1. Cataloguing my collection in the way I want it. 2. Control from a hand-held touch-screen device. 3. Multi-zone control. I have exhausted many trials of downloadable media servers. Even high-end custom multimedia installations fail on the most basic premise that they can't categorise your music in any other way than by Track Artist, Album Title or Genre. Meedio's library handling is absolutely fantastic, possibly the only one that is completely flexible is organising menus, sub-menus, steps, lebves, drill-downs, sorting orders etc. But it fails on 2 and 3 and jhas other limitations and bugs. It is now obsolete. The revamped MeediOS is still under development and can't be considered production software. It has a UPnP module under development (to publish the Meedio library via UPnP), but it doesn't appear to work very well and is still a way off. I have started to use Synology NAS units for data storage and backup and they have a built-in UPnP server which works extremely well, but it can only do Artist, Album and Genre. What about Album Artists, Compilations, multi-disc sets etc, sorting albums by year, etc?? Most media servers mangle my correctly-tagged music and render it unbrowsable. What's the point of having a powerful media database and not being able to specify how to catalogue it? I've now come across Squeeze Server. Of course, I always overlooked it at first becuase it's a proprietary system and will only work with Squeezeboxes, and of course will not do photos and videos. But I was intrigued as to its more flexible tag recognition and also the Custom Browse plugin. And now, I've come across the Whitebear UPnP server. Wow! Is this the software of my dreams - a flexible database, catalogued how I want it, and published via UPnP to allow playing on any device around my house? I was playing around withit last night and I'm extremely impressed. I haven't got it completely working yet but it shows great promise. The two major problems I've found are as follows: 1. I can't actually play anything! (I'm browsing via a WD HD TV Live box, but will eventually use a UPnP control point on an iPad to push media to the renderers). I can drill down to individual tracks and press Play, the Now Playing screen will come up and display the album art, but the track doesn't actually start. If it can display the album art, there can't be any permission problems to the media directory. I've changed the default UPnP port to 2869 as originally I couldn't get the WD box to discover the Whitebear server. 2. I've altered the settings in the Squeeze server which are supposed to enable multi-disc sets and album artists, however the menus I get via Whitebear don't change - they seem like the default Squeeze menus. Does Whitebear just use the default menus or will it honour the settings and configurations you've made within Squeeze and indeed the Custom Browse plugin if you've got it installed? Many thanks for keeping my dream alive! -- csimon ------------------------------------------------------------------------ csimon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=40283 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80632 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list plugins@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
