mt-daapd advice on a new/dev distro for NAS devices…

[davy_gravy]

Hi Ron & all,

I am not inexperienced w/ mt-daapd & firefly, as I have been running them (stable & nightlies) for nearly a year, streaming music from my LinkStations to my Roku or Apple Desktop/Laptop… & lovin’ it. My main LinkStationHG has Debian & 2.6 kernel, running one of the 14xx nightlies. It works great…

Lately I am working with a Linux distro for NAS devices that is still in development stages. I have this distro (pre-beta) installed on another LS-HG, and I am testing it.

My problems/questions:

1. the distro comes w/ 0.2.3 r0.
-are there any advantages to having 0.2.3 installed instead of 0.2.4?
-does this version have any bugs, such as a problem w/ the mt-daapd.conf file being completely overwritten when changed via the web browser interface?
-other bugs?

2. I am having a problem w/ Avahi and 0.2.3r0, which are both installed in the new distro, by default. It seems that I can play music from both LinkStations on my Roku, but when I try to access the streams via iTUnes or VLC, only one stream is visible (yes they have different names) or playable. From iTUnes, only the nightly is visible (sometimes) and the 0.2.3 mt-daapd server shows up under Shared Music, but will not play – no error message, it just won’t stay selected/play. A port scan of the machine running 0.2.3 shows that it is running & 3689 is open, and it will play on VLC (though VLC seems to crash sometimes when chewing on this stream).

Are Avahi & the mdns already in mt-daapd 0.2.3 having some sort of conflict taht is causing this? Ideas on how to make the 2 of them “play nice together”?

3. If I were to suggest to the developer to use a nightly, I would need some sort of an idea of dependencies, so the correct companion packages could be built.
-what are the requirements of 0.2.4?

-same for the newer nightlies, in the 14xx or 15xx range?

Humble thanks and gratitude,

davy_gravy

[rpedde]

@davy_gravy wrote:

1. the distro comes w/ 0.2.3 r0.
-are there any advantages to having 0.2.3 installed instead of 0.2.4?
-does this version have any bugs, such as a problem w/ the mt-daapd.conf file being completely overwritten when changed via the web browser interface?

0.2.3 versus 0.2.4 was an iTunes 6 interop issue. I don’t think 0.2.3 works with iTunes > 6.0.

Yes, the config file gets completely re-written when saving from web interface. Comments get wiped, etc.

Another potential showstopper for 0.2.x vs. nightlies is that 0.2.x won’t allow multiple mp3 directories, and won’t allow the library to be on more than one physical device (indexed by inode — dumb design, I know).

Another *another* potiential gotcha with 0.2.x is lack of support for ogg/flac and transcoding.

If I were to recommend something right now, it would probably be svn-1489.

Are Avahi & the mdns already in mt-daapd 0.2.3 having some sort of conflict taht is causing this? Ideas on how to make the 2 of them “play nice together”?

Ya, they don’t work well together. The definitely step on each other. To make it work, you would want to run mt-daad with “-m” to turn off the built-in multicast daemon, and then add a static config entry in the avahi config to advertise mt-daapd.

Or, if looking at nightlies (recommended!) then you could compile either to the howl compat libraries for avahi, or avahi native if using a new enough revision (r1448 or later).

3. If I were to suggest to the developer to use a nightly, I would need some sort of an idea of dependencies, so the correct companion packages could be built.

libid3tag, libsqlite (either 2.8.x or 3.3.7 or better), zlib.

Optionally:

libogg (ogg metadata reading)
vorbis-tools (for transcoding ogg)
libflac (flac metadata reading)
flac (for transcoding flac)

-what are the requirements of 0.2.4?

libid3tag, zlib, gdbm

Humble thanks and gratitude,

np. Yell if you need more info or any advice. Good luck.

— Ron

[davy_gravy]

Ron,

thanks very much for the detailed reply – it was very helpful when I went to submit a ticket to the bug tracker.

thanks again,

Dave

[davy_gravy]

with your info, Ron, I was able to make a suggestion to two to the developer of a new distro for smaller NAS devices (foonas). The wiki/trac is at

trac.foonas.org and the distro has a lot of promise.

Do you currently use OE (OpenEmbedded) for generating your .ipk packages?

[rpedde]

@davy_gravy wrote:

with your info, Ron, I was able to make a suggestion to two to the developer of a new distro for smaller NAS devices (foonas). The wiki/trac is at

trac.foonas.org and the distro has a lot of promise.

Do you currently use OE (OpenEmbedded) for generating your .ipk packages?

No, I don’t, but it you point me to info on bootstrapping a build chain, I would entertain the idea of dropping nightlies for OE.

— Ron

[davy_gravy]

I built my toolchain from the instructions here…

http://trac.foonas.org/wiki/InstallOpenEmbedded

built it on a Debian PPC (very old G4 PowerMac), … all the standard OE packages from OE itself build straightaway… I just am a bit too green to get the firefly.bb or firefly.inc files straight.

libsqlite0 builds as part of sqlite

and

zlib also builds…

The OE User Manual has a section about developing & getting stuff set to go upstream.

http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/MainPage

[Author]

Posts