Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:41 am
Xbox 360 experiences with Mac OS-X
I've tried out quite a few DNLA servers, and SERViiO and TVMOBILI are the two that seemed to work best, however I've run into a number of problems along the way:
I read the thread describing the problem of playing mp4 files, and I did confirm that the issue appeared to be the AAC audio stream. However, this should have been doable using the transcoding capability, correct? I tried also selecting the stereo mixdown but that had no effect. I cracked out ffmpeg and performed the video passthrough (copy) and mixed down the audio to 2 channels, and then it seemed to play, but with pretty bad audio artifacts. It says that ffmpeg is supposed to choose the least lossy solution, but I was underwhelmed with the experience.
I used:
% ffmpeg -i file1.mp4 -vcodec copy -ac 2 file2.mp4
Interestingly the file conversion resulted in something that was "ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 2" to "ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1"
There also appears to be some audio compatibilities with the XBOX that I haven't sorted out. Some mp3 files seem to play and others do not. I will see if I can figure out why. I get the usual bizarre error message from the XBOX when that happens.
The other thing that SERViiO doesn't seem to do right is to detect new media or changes in the directories selected. Quite a number of times I added new files to my directory, and it refused to find them. I tried to "force refresh" and restarted the server and that seemed to help, but I wish this just worked without me having to screw around with the settings.
Despite all that, it does more things right than pretty much every other program out there. It's too bad this DLNA business had to end up being so darn complicated. Thanks for your efforts, and I hope to get these issues debugged eventually.
I read the thread describing the problem of playing mp4 files, and I did confirm that the issue appeared to be the AAC audio stream. However, this should have been doable using the transcoding capability, correct? I tried also selecting the stereo mixdown but that had no effect. I cracked out ffmpeg and performed the video passthrough (copy) and mixed down the audio to 2 channels, and then it seemed to play, but with pretty bad audio artifacts. It says that ffmpeg is supposed to choose the least lossy solution, but I was underwhelmed with the experience.
I used:
% ffmpeg -i file1.mp4 -vcodec copy -ac 2 file2.mp4
Interestingly the file conversion resulted in something that was "ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 2" to "ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1"
There also appears to be some audio compatibilities with the XBOX that I haven't sorted out. Some mp3 files seem to play and others do not. I will see if I can figure out why. I get the usual bizarre error message from the XBOX when that happens.
The other thing that SERViiO doesn't seem to do right is to detect new media or changes in the directories selected. Quite a number of times I added new files to my directory, and it refused to find them. I tried to "force refresh" and restarted the server and that seemed to help, but I wish this just worked without me having to screw around with the settings.
Despite all that, it does more things right than pretty much every other program out there. It's too bad this DLNA business had to end up being so darn complicated. Thanks for your efforts, and I hope to get these issues debugged eventually.
