Slimserver move to Linux

[Meshoulam, Arnon]

Hi,

I've just completed my move of the Slimserver to Linux - Fedora Core 2.
The Window's server was hogging the kid's PC and I had a old 386 laying
around - so Linux seemed the right way to go.

Overall, perfomance is good, although scanning a full library - wipe
cache - does cause the sound stop and restart

However, I thought the move would be smooth, and I ran into a few issues
- wanted to share them, and get some feedback on the unresovled ones.

My library is a mixture of MP3, FLACS and WMA; Clients are a SBG box and
Squeezesoft
To complicated it, many files are tagged with international tags -
non-latin1

1. FLAC playback - no issues.
Installed flac 1.1.1. Still haven't seen the external cue
working, but I have the latest release and not one of the nightly
builds.
I did try using flac 1.1.1 with the skip and until paramaters,
but nothing worked.

2. WMA playback - commented out wmadec and installed ffmpeg 0.4.8 -
needed a few libraries, but all were available through a google search.
I cannot get the squeezebox to work with direct wav, and need to
convert it to mp3 with lame. My convert.conf
#wma mp3 squeezebox *
# [ffmpeg] -v 0 -i $FILE$ -f wav -
wma mp3 * *
[ffmpeg] -v 0 -i $FILE$ -f wav - | [lame] -x -m s -r -S -q 5 -s
44.1 - -

3. iTunes files - work fine. Not lossles, but real iTune files. Followed
some instructions and installed faad (also required some libraries).
Conf file:
mov mp3 * *
[faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$ | [lame] --resample 44100 --silent
-q 9 -b $BITRATE$ -r - -

mov wav squeezebox *
[faad] -w -f 2 $FILE$

4. WMA Streaming - on windows I was using WMAStream to listen to
external WMA streams. Of course alienstream isn't available on linux,
and I have tried it with
Mplayer (installed with some libraries and codec), but no luck - stream
doesn't connect or is so stuttered it is useless

5. AlienBBC streaming - works fine, although requires lame again for
some reason.

6. Internaltional tags - some serious issues here. Have been working
with Dan for a while on this. Not clear how windows encodes Unicode
strings on flac/wma (non-mp3) tags but Unix can't extract it.

Summary, works on linux - potentially cheaper HW, but still some serious
issue.

Arnon

[Andrew W. Donoho]

On Oct 18, 2004, at 13:18, Meshoulam, Arnon wrote:
> Summary, works on linux - potentially cheaper HW, but still some
> serious issue.


Amon,

I just moved to Fedora Core 2. I found that my system got better
(fewer drop outs) when I turned on preemptive scheduling in the kernel.
That and enough memory have made my SqueezeBox much nicer.

Andrew
____________________________________
Andrew W. Donoho
awd (AT) DDG (DOT) com, PGP Key ID: 0x81D0F250
+1 (512) 453-6652 (o), +1 (512) 750-7596 (m)



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