Fritz!Box 7270 and 5.1: Working, but various problems

[Larry]

Hello Forum,

I've been using TwonkyVision on the FritzBox 7270 for quite some time.

It has always been working, but there also always were small quirks. E.g. during the 4.x release cycle, playlists - always shaky at best - stopped working sometime. So I decided to upgrade to 5.1. I got this one working, but have a few problems.

At first my setup, maybe it is of use to others trying to use Twonky on the FritzBox:

• - The external harddisk is mounted at /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/
  - Twonky resides in /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/Twonkymedia/
  - Twonky stores its data in /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/var/twonkymedia/
  - The uclib 0.9.28 - search http://www.ip-phoneforum.de for it - is stored in /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/lib/ (needed, as the FritzBox uses the newer version 0.9.29 which is incompatible with Twonky)

Autostart of Twonky when FritzBox starts (/var/flash/debug.cfg):

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/telnetd -l /sbin/ar7login
{
sleep 120;
/var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/Twonkymedia/twonky.sh;
} > /dev/null 2<&1 &

Startscript (/var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/Twonkymedia/twonky.sh):

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
[ -n "`pidof twonkymedia`" ] &&  killall twonkymedia
[ -n "`pidof twonkymediaserver`" ] &&  killall twonkymediaserver
cd /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/Twonkymedia
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/lib; ./twonkymedia -D -appdata /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/SYSTEM/var/twonkymedia -ip 192.168.178.1

This way TwonkyMedia starts itself with the FritzBox and - basically - works as expected. Especially playlists work definitely better than before, even different and extended formats.
(Caveat: Don't use special chars like the German "umlauts": As the codepage always seems to be different between PC, FritzBox and Twonky, this always gives problems which might not be obvious a first, especially in playlists.)

But now my problems:

• - Album Art: Each of my music folders contains a file named "folder.jpg". In Twonky 4.x, those were rendered flawlessly by both my Philps NP2500 and Playstation 3. Now with 5.1, all my clients only display Twonky's default picture for "no album art available" (which is, BTW, terrible - why won't Twonky simply let the client render its own default pic?). What is going wrong here? I tried "Philips NP2x00", "Philips NP2500" and Philips Streamium Audio" as client type, to no avail.
  - Settings: Trying to set up the client (client type, mode of navigation) doesn't seem to work. It always resets itself to the default settings.
  - Missing files: Somehow Twonky seems to miss 3 mp3-Files of my 4000+ - Song collection (during my first tries with 5.1, it worked, but somehow at the moment I'm always missing these three songs). How can I identify files Twonky misses out for some reason? Logging doesn't work for me, as the /tmp/ drawer is seemingly not user-writeable on the FritzBox.
  - Resize/Transcode of pictures: When displaying pictures, e.g. for the PS3, Twonky seems to do transcoding (which is turned off in the settings). Obviously, this shouldn't be done by the poor FritzBox, as the PS3 is infinitely more powerful. The cache-Drawer of Twonky fills up with thumbnails of my photos, named "albumart-xyz.jpg"?!?!?!?. Tried renaming "convert" and "cgi-jpegscale" in Twonky's cgi-bin-drawer, doesn't seem to stop Twonky from doing stupid things with pictures. This might be related with the album art problem?
  - Stability: Might be related with the above, especially the uncontrollable cpu-thrashing transcoding, but 5.1 seems to be a lot more unstable than 4.x, is that possible?

Maybe somebody has a hint how to solve these problems?

[Larry]

No ideas, anybody ?
I also tried downgrading to the latest 5.0 version - which wouldn't even start.

[umgfoin]

Larry,
for me it helped to do some adjustments in client.db (located in the resources directory), which controls device-specific behaviour of the server.
look for the NP2x00 sections. They start with:

Code: Select all

>>
NA:Philips Streamium NP2x00
HH:NP2x00

You'll find all in all 3 relevant entries - NP2500, NP2900 and NP2x00
Best is to change all 3, as the clients are not always correctly detected.

quote-out the XM:AASCALE entries.
e.g.:

Code: Select all

>>
NA:Philips Streamium NP2500
HH:NP2500
DD:Philips Streamium HiFi Link
XM:PHILIPSSEARCH
// XM:AASCALE#JPEG320x320
TR:JPEG42x42,JPEG320x240,JPEG_SM
XM:DLNA10
DB:FIX

Additionally, I deleted the "convert" binary in the cgi-bin directory, which may mess-up cpu-load and is not needed for NP2x00 support anyway.

An optimization for your debug.cfg:

Code: Select all

while [ ! -d /var/media/ftp/ExternalHD ]; do
	sleep 2
done

/var/media/ftp/ExternalHD/Twonkymedia/twonky.sh

bg,
armin.

[Larry]

Thanks for the hints! The modified debug.cfg looks good, I'll try that!

Removing the "AASCALE"-entry did not work, however, still no album art .

However, changing the clients.db seems to have resulted in a more stable interaction between Twonky5.1 and the Philips. No more random crashes and problems of the NP2500 to recognize the server (knock on wood).

I also entered
XM:NOTRPICS (should disable all resizing of pics?!?)
AV:M (as I don't use the NP2500 for pictures; album art seems not to be related to this switch)

I don't get the meaning of the "TR"-entries. Now mine looks like:
TR:JPEG_TN,JPEG_SM,JPEG_MED,JPEG_LRG,JPEG_HD,MP3,WAV
...meaning Twonky should not transcode anything but send everything as-is to the NP2500. Or am I getting something wrong here?

BTW, is there any possibility like a public bug tracker in order to report those bugs?

[golfman]

I have Twonky 5.1 installed on a Linux box and see similar problems with Album Art. I like 5.1 in that CPU usage doesn't peg as it did with previous version of 5.0x, but I wish the album art would work properly. For me its a case some work, some don't. All my folders have a folder.jpg in them, and all of the artwork is supposed to have embedded album art. Perhaps my case is that some of the mp4's don't really have the artwork embedded, but iTunes (when mounted via SMB) renders them correctly.

Does anybody have any suggestions on how to get the Album Art working correctly? I'm on the version of going back to 5.0.68.

[umgfoin]

All my folders have a folder.jpg in them, and all of the artwork is supposed to have embedded album art.

I have bad experience with embedded album-art. NP2x00 seems to be picky about size, dimensions, formats etc.
I can confirm, that atleast for some track-formats, embedded images have presedence over upnp-provided album-art.
If the player detects an image-tag but can't extract/ render the embedded image you won't see the miracle even if your server provides a valid image.
Therefor, I systematically removed all embedded album-art from my music-library in favour of the server based "folder.jpg" system. This greatly improved the situation.

Btw. "removing" cover-art in itunes is not always straight forward:
Whereas Itunes stores album art images for user encoded tracks preferred in its library database, tracks purchased through the itunes-store always seem to have embedded images.
Consequently removing tags is different for the two cases.

[umgfoin]

When I was syncing them to my Xbox using Windows Media player I was able to see the artwork. When I use Twonky I dont see artwork.

I guess, mediaplayer uses a different approach to extract embedded artwork-tags than twonky does.
I generally refrain from embedding album-art in favour of the "folder.jpg"-mechanism. Of course it means some work, if you relied on embedded tags sofar, but it works with almost every player/ server and you're no longer dependant on correctly implemented tag-interpreters or changes to the meta-structure of specific audio-formats.