XML

While it often annoys my better half intensely, I do like to listen to BBC Radio 4 in the morning. When we moved into the village over a decade ago we discovered that FM reception was patchy at best and so for years we were stuck with long wave which wasn't great either. Eventually I bought a Pure DAB/FM radio which does get good reception all the time. I even replaced the CD payer/radio in the kitchen with another Pure DAB radio. One of the things both devices could do was play streamed media from a UPnP server. I set up a server and played all my music to them!

All worked well until one day when the radio in the kitchen refused to play anything on the media server, the clock radio in the bedroom was fine. I tried several times to fix this, but as I hadn't changed my server I was at a bit of a loss. Last weekend my clock radio updated it's self and then it refused to play anything, so now I was really annoyed and spent most of yesterday night and a chunk of this evening working on it.

After several false starts, I was able to get to the bottom of the situation, I think two things were at fault: the Pure devices stopped accepting raw 16-bit audio streams, the example of how to configure the ogg to something else transformation was wrong and would never work. Once I realised the raw data wouldn't work it was just a case of figuring out why the transcoded music wasn't working and that was down to the missing switch "-y".

Today's blip is a section of the XML configuration file for my MediaTomb UPnP server, showing the revised line for the ffmpeg transcoding, and the "-y" argument is just visible!