[Announce] 'MediaServer' *certified* Alexa skill for LMS

[philchillbill]

Could be related, but playing directly from Amazon music or BBC radio works fine on the echos so I'm not sure its exactly same problem.

I've tried de-registering and re-registering the echo too, and that made no difference.

It's a bit weird how the echo player never appears as a player in the front end, in my case it only appears on the Settings - Information screen with the same IP as the LMS server itself (as a Web Client) - is that expected ?

When I access the stream.mp3 endpoint from a browser on my laptop - the laptop appears as a player in LMS with the laptop IP - hence the question

Can you also advise what the UUID is used for in the set up process ? I'm using the the one that appears on the echo spot screen when I ask it to discover my players (the ngrok-updater.sh script succeeds fine with that UUID but I'm still curious if it is relevant)

Just thought of something: A while back I was asked by a user with an odd setup (he did not have credentials on his non-ngrok proxy but did have credentials on his LMS instead) if I could pass the credentials through in the stream-URL which seemed harmless at the time. These then end up in the path to the /stream.mp3 endpoint but are ignored if LMS has no credential enabled:

http://username:password@192.168.1.2...er=Alexa-xxxxx

However, if you have any of the characters : @ / = ? in your username or password, it would mess up streaming. If that's the case for you, remove the offending character and re-try.

If that was the issue then I'll have a think how I could get around the issue by perhaps urlencoding (not sure if LMS would accept URL encoded credentials for him).

Regarding the uuid, I don't want to store people's privacy-sensitive data so you don't have an account/login with my back-end (smartskills.tech). Instead, I recognise users anonymously by assigning a uuid to them. You actually store the uuid, not me. It's kept in your browser's localStorage database which normally survives clearing your browser cache.



EDIT: I've added url-encoding to the <userinfo> so streaming may work for you now as-is.

[smarties]

EDIT: I've added url-encoding to the <userinfo> so streaming may work for you now as-is.

Bingo ! It works again Fantastic - many thanks for your help.

(and yes the password did have one of those characters in it)

Great stuff - I have 2 very happy kids in the house again !

Thanks again!

[philchillbill]

Bingo ! It works again Fantastic - many thanks for your help.

(and yes the password did have one of those characters in it)

Great stuff - I have 2 very happy kids in the house again !

Thanks again!

Good to hear. I'd hazard a guess that you changed your password and started including the illegal character at the same time you switched routers? Otherwise there's no logical explanation for why it used to work but suddenly stopped.

[smarties]

Good to hear. I'd hazard a guess that you changed your password and started including the illegal character at the same time you switched routers? Otherwise there's no logical explanation for why it used to work but suddenly stopped.

Hmmm.. I can't remember to be honest, but I don't think I did. Obviously I would have changed the LMS IP in the ngrok config file at the time but there wouldn't have been a reason for me to change the password. Maybe I did a full reinstall & setup though, and got my password manager to generate a new one. Not sure.

For what it's worth I just remembered it was around the time of your 6.0 release - note I'm also using the LMS-lite skill so that I can use routines to turn on players & queue up favourites) - might be relevant ?

[philchillbill]

Hmmm.. I can't remember to be honest, but I don't think I did. Obviously I would have changed the LMS IP in the ngrok config file at the time but there wouldn't have been a reason for me to change the password. Maybe I did a full reinstall & setup though, and got my password manager to generate a new one. Not sure.

For what it's worth I just remembered it was around the time of your 6.0 release - note I'm also using the LMS-lite skill so that I can use routines to turn on players & queue up favourites) - might be relevant ?

The changes that broke things for you went live on Feb 16th so maybe it was just that and not a password change if your kids didn’t let you know at the time. Anyway, it’s fixed now so thanks for uncovering this corner case bug. Real users always break software in ways the authors cannot imagine!

[Peter Galbavy]

Just to say I had the same as the above and I thought my restart (and update) of LMS fixed it, but it could have been the same timelines and fix.

[philchillbill]

I updated a lot of the nodejs npm libraries used by MediaServer. Didn't find any bugs during my testing but let me know if any unexpected behaviour surfaces.

[philchillbill]

There's been a major update to ngrok (v3.0) adding lots of new functionality not necessary for use with LMS/MediaServer. See https://ngrok.com/next-generation.

There's mention that the free plan will start seeing some restrictions and I'm not sure how that will pan out for MediaServer users. Let me know if you start seeing issues. For now at least, the automated setup targeting v2 still seems to work.

According to the announcement:
* Your v2 agents will continue to work indefinitely. You do not need to upgrade to the v3 agent.
* Be aware that the v3 agent is not fully backward compatible. Please consult our agent upgrading guide to help you through the transition.