Support for iPhone app - 8Player

[RMerlin]

Hi,

Being disappointed in m-connect's stability, I started shopping around for a new DLNA client for my iPod Touch. I ran into this new client named 8Player (released only a few days ago). Its UI looks very nice, and for half the price of m-connect it provides audio/video/photo support (but no server support).

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/8play...5860275&?mt=8#

I had no problem playing music served by Mezzmo, however video doesn't seem to work, even if I use the device profile created for m-connect (which, I assume, simply enumerates all the formats natively supported by the iPod).

Can you guys give me a hand tinkering with it so I could get it to play my videos as well? The user-agent looks like this:

User-Agent: 8player/1.0 CFNetwork/485.2 Darwin/10.3.1

If actual Mezzmo logs could help you just let me know, and I will mail you the logs generated while I attempted to play a video. I'm also willing to test things out for you.

[Paul]

Hi,

Thank you for the user-agent, no need for logs for now.

I'll create a new device profile for it, but I couldn't find information on what formats it supports (the site looks like just a YouTube video with nothing else?). Or is it just basically what the iPhone supports natively?

Please send a message to support, so that I could send you a device profile for it to try.

[RMerlin]

Email sent.

I'll update this thread once we have a working profile in case anyone else is interested in also using 8Player.

[techpatriot]

I too am trying to get Mezzmo to work some some of the iPod Touch apps. I've been playing around with Media Link Player Lite, but haven't had much success. Have you had any luck using 8Player yet?

Thanks,
John

[RMerlin]

I have no issue with audio streaming in 8Player or m-connect (the cheap version). iMedia Suite works too, but there's a long delay before it starts playing audio (probably too aggressive buffering), so I wouldn't recommend it.

Video streaming however is a no go, in good part due to the fact that ffmpeg can no longer transcode to AAC audio.

There are test builds of ffmpeg that has experimental AAC encoding, but I hadn't had time to fiddle with it yet.

[techpatriot]

I've messed around tonight trying to get the right ffmpeg settings. I've copied profiles from what others are using with things like Twonky and TVersity, but no luck still. One question though - should I be seeing a process of ffmpeg.exe when I streaming to my iPhone? It seems like it is never called or never involked to do it transcoding in real-time.

Thanks,
John

[Paul]

Yes, it should appear in the Task Manager and of course the CPU should go up. If it doesn't, maybe it's failing or the device profile is not entirely correct. If you can send me a transcoding log, I'll be able to tell what's happening.

[RMerlin]

Dennis, what would be the simplest way to set the iPod device to transcode anything sent at it, so that way I could easily test the transcoding part while taking the profile details out of the equation?

[Paul]

In the device profile, just use this section near the top:

        	<supported>no</supported>
	        	<!-- baseline, bestfit, transcodedlist, nonsupported and preferredtranscoded can be either one of: yes, no, auto
	        	     yes = always deliver, no = never deliver, auto = deliver if not delivered already by one of the rules above it -->
	       	<bestfit>auto</bestfit>
        	<preferredtranscoded>auto</preferredtranscoded>
        	<transcodedlist>auto</transcodedlist>
        	<baseline>auto</baseline>
        	<nonsupported>auto</nonsupported>

this basically changes "supported" to be "no", which means that even if the file matches the device profile, it'll still be transcoded and not passed through.

Of course the device profile should define at least encode="1" avcontainer with at least one video and one audio formats with encode="1" as well, otherwise nothing will be delivered at all.

[techpatriot]

I'm going to try this out tonight. Thanks for sharing.

-John