Playback stops directly after background scan (mipsel 2.4.0)

[wouter]

Hi,

I tried searching the forum for a previous post on this issue, but haven’t found anything so I’m not sure this is a known issue.

I’m running the mt-daapd 2.4.0 mipsel ipkg on an Asus WL-500g premium router with attached USB drive. The firefly server appears to be running well, the webinterface works, I can scan my files on startup and I can see the iTunes share on both my iMac and iBook in iTunes, as well as in XBMC on my XBOX. When I start playback, the mp3’s get streamed ok, but playback consistently stopped on me in the middle of a track, everytime after about 10 minutes. This happened on both iTunes as well as XBMC. With iTunes I could just re-start playback and it would stop after another 10 minutes, XBMC refuses to play anything after that.

Because of the consistent 10-minute-to-failure period I suspected the playback cutoff was related to the background file scan, so I tried running with -d 9 in foreground mode. This confirmed my suspicion: every time FireFly completed the scan, playback would instantly stop. I increased the scan period and did a few runs to be sure, which got me a log output very similar to the output below every time playback stopped:

Request: GET /databases/1/containers?meta=dmap.itemid,dmap.itemname,

dmap.persistentid,com.apple.itunes.smart-playlist,

dmap.haschildcontainers,dmap.parentcontainerid,

com.apple.itunes.is-podcast-playlist,com.apple.itunes.special-playlist&

revision-number=15384&delta=13742 HTTP/1.1

Request: GET /databases/1/containers/1/items?type=music&meta=dmap.itemkind,dmap.itemid,

dmap.containeritemid&revision-number=15384&delta=13742 HTTP/1.1

Scanned 1797 songs (was 1797) in 215 seconds

Request: GET /databases/1/containers/4/items?type=music&meta=dmap.itemkind,dmap.itemid,

dmap.containeritemid&revision-number=15384&delta=13742 HTTP/1.1

Request: GET /update?revision-number=15384&delta=15384 HTTP/1.1

Finished streaming file to remote: 3530752 bytes

Request: GET /databases?revision-number=16174&delta=15384 HTTP/1.1

Request: GET /databases/1/items?type=music&meta=dmap.itemid,dmap.itemname,dmap.itemkind,

dmap.persistentid,daap.songalbum,daap.songgrouping,daap.songartist,

daap.songalbumartist, daap.songbitrate,daap.songbeatsperminute,

daap.songcomment,daap.songcodectype,daap.songcodecsubtype,

daap.songcompilation,daap.songcomposer,daap.songdateadded,

daap.songdatemodified,daap.songdisccount,daap.songdiscnumber,

daap.songdisabled,daap.songeqpreset,daap.songformat,

daap.songgenre,daap.songdescription,daap.songrelativevolume,

daap.songsamplerate,daap.songsize,daap.songstarttime,

daap.songstoptime,daap.songtime,daap.songtrackcount,

daap.songtracknumber,daap.songuserrating,daap.songyear,

daap.songdatakind,daap.songdataurl,daap.songcontentrating,

com.apple.itunes.norm-volume,com.apple.itunes.itms-songid,

com.apple.itunes.itms-artistid,com.apple.itunes.itms-playlistid,

com.apple.itunes.itms-composerid,com.apple.itunes.itms-genreid,

com.apple.itunes.itms-storefrontid,com.apple.itunes.has-video,

daap.songcategory,daap.songcontentdescription,

daap.sUnknown meta code: daap.songalbumartist

The ‘Finished streaming file to remote’ message is especially interesting in this context. In this particular run iTunes was playing a ~3:52 minute song and stopped halfways through it when this log entry was printed. In other words: the number of bytes printed appears to be for the complete file, but only half of it was streamed when it was printed. This happens each time playback hangs.

I’m also having a completely unrelated playback issue with XBMC, somehow XBMC only wants to play songs when they are started in the ‘files’ view. As soon as I start one from the ‘library’ view (or when I start ‘party mode’), I get a “404: daapd://[..]: file not found” in the FireFly log, and from that point on XBMC doesn’t play *any* file from FireFly anymore (it does request them, but now all files get 404, even when started from the ‘files’ view). I’m still looking into this and will create a separate post for this when I find out more.

[rpedde]

@wouter wrote:

I’m running the mt-daapd 2.4.0 mipsel ipkg on an Asus WL-500g premium router with attached USB drive.

The 0.2.x line is very different than nightlies. I really don’t have a good handle anymore for what 0.2.x does and why.

The firefly server appears to be running well, the webinterface works, I can scan my files on startup and I can see the iTunes share on both my iMac and iBook in iTunes, as well as in XBMC on my XBOX. When I start playback, the mp3’s get streamed ok, but playback consistently stopped on me in the middle of a track, everytime after about 10 minutes. This happened on both iTunes as well as XBMC. With iTunes I could just re-start playback and it would stop after another 10 minutes, XBMC refuses to play anything after that.

That sounds like maybe db contention after updates. After an update, the db version changes, and clients request new copies of the database. That locks the database, and can potentially tie up the server for some time. Particularly if you have multiple clients connected.

I’m also having a completely unrelated playback issue with XBMC, somehow XBMC only wants to play songs when they are started in the ‘files’ view. As soon as I start one from the ‘library’ view (or when I start ‘party mode’), I get a “404: daapd://[..]: file not found” in the FireFly log, and from that point on XBMC doesn’t play *any* file from FireFly anymore (it does request them, but now all files get 404, even when started from the ‘files’ view). I’m still looking into this and will create a separate post for this when I find out more.

The problem I have right now is that it doesn’t work with xbmc *at all* with the nightlies line.

I think you best solution would be to upgrade to nightlies once I have it working with xbmc. I have a couple people beating up on me via im about just that, so I hope to spend some time on that in the next few days.

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