Universal Media Server | Forum

Hi Subjunk! You might remember me from 3 years ago when I was interacting heavily with you on (I think) the doom9 forum, subforum Avisynth, and your very long thread about Interframe. Every fall (and following), I've been heavily using Interframe. But this season, I need to refrain from writing Avisynth scripts as much as possible. I am racing to hunt down and find solutinos that I thought would be forthcoming but keep running into disappointments. I was bemoaning that I might have to resort to scripts after all, and was reviewing your Interframe web page, where it mentioned THIS (UMS). I never heard of it! Looks like you've done a fabulous job with it from what I can tell.

So I said, "I'll bite". I've installed, and the very first file I wish to play out to my Chromecast Ultra, fails to play. For a couple minutes I see a grey line on a black screen crawling left to right at bottom of TV screen, but nothing of the video plays.

I was startled to not see a menu item to open a video file, but did find it after selecting my Chromecast Ultra. The only two potentially anomalies I can think of are:
1. It's a highbitrate file of a video that is 1080i30, that is, interlaced. H.264, with aac audio. I am really hoping I can get this catagory of file to play and cast.
2. When it asked me to let it install Avisynth 2.6MT, I skipped it for this reason. A few days ago, while researching SVP Pro as a viable solution, it comes out that they use Avisynth+. I was running a script "from the past" and "setmtmode" was an error. Posting on their board revealed that they use Avisynth+. If I didn't want to convert my logic to the new method of multithreading, he said to take my old Avisynth dll and store it where the Virtualdub executable is. I did so, and was able to run my old script again. So.... what's the deal with you having (and requiring me to have) 2.6MT vs SVP's requirement that I have Avisynth+? And was it this issue that prevented my video from playing??

I feel this is pretty basic, but do I still need to collect and send the log as per normal "problem reporting"? I was hoping it was something more simple that wouldn't require that. It's rather discouraging to get a "big new toy", then it not work right out of the box.

SubJunk doesn't usually answer very frequently on this forum, so to give you some response in a reasonable time I'll give what little knowledge I have about the subject. Hopefully SubJunk will provide a better answer with time.

First of all, I'm not sure what expectations you have about UMS, but it is an UPnP AV/DLNA server for serving media files to devices supporting either standard (DLNA is a subset of UPnP AV). Chromecast doesn't support UPnP AV or DLNA but use Google's proprietary protocol instead. That makes it incompatible with UMS to start with. We an implementation of some Chromecast support made by a former developer, but based on user feedback it is very much lacking and buggy. None of the current developers own a Chromecast, and as the standard isn't public support isn't trivial. In short, you might as well consider UMS as not supporting Chromecasts.

UPnP/DLNA is based on a concept where the browsing is done from the renderer (the playback device). From what I understand Chromecasts doesn't have a UI, and is as such fundamentally incompatible. You won't find a "open file" menu in UMS, as that's not what UMS does. You tell UMS which folders you want to share with your devices, and then you browse, select and play the media from your devices.

What you found by clicking the Chromecast icon is another half-finished feature that is based on UPnP remote control. It doesn't work very well with compliant renderers, so I can't imagine it would work at all with a Chromecast. That's not the way UMS is supposed to be used anyway.

The "best" solution if you want to use UMS with a Chromecast is using an UPnP/DLNA capable renderer that can send media to your Chromecast. I think BubbleUPnP is the most used solution for this, it allows you to use your phone or tablet to browse UMS' media and play them on the Chromecast. Still, Chromecast is known to be buggy.

When it comes to Interframe and AviSynth(+) I know as good as nothing. I know it's very far from outside the "core" use of UMS. AviSynth is problematic in many ways, both with its lack of platform support and it's non existing unicode support. Nether does it seem to be maintained. AviSynth+ hasn't been updated since 2013 so it seems completely dead. I don't know if our Interframe implementation has gotten any attention in later years, but I certainly haven't seen anything being done with it. My impression is that this was something SubJunk was doing out of personal interest (he wanted to use it with UMS himself). It might be that the phase has passed. From what I understand, this is first and foremost something used with cartoons (animes)? All I know is that I've seen very few questions about this, and I've never seen the need to get to know the solution.

Thank you, Nadahar. You make a good "Subjunk" substitute, ha ha.

I bought the Chromecast, then the Ultra, believing (1) it could do what I wanted, and (2) it was the only device of it's kind out there. Now that (1) it "doesn't really work" and (2) I hear rumors of other devices out there, maybe I have bought the wrong products. Can you recommend a device, hopefully cheap, that WILL (preferrably under UMS) play just about any file to a TV *correctly*?? Especially I need two types:

1. 1080i30 files encoded to H264 transport streams, but plays deinterlaced at p60, and
2. H264 TS and Mpeg2 MPG files that are already p60 (1080p60).

I may have started at the wrong end. Perhaps should have found software, then bought hardware to match. I just didn't know of other hardware. Btw, I can give a 10-sec sample of type 1 files.

I'm really no the right person to ask about which device to recommend as I have no such device myself. The DLNA capable devices I have is an Onkyo receiver, a PS3 and several Android devices. If I want to play DLNA content on my TV I use the PS3, even though it has many limitations and I wouldn't recommend that either.

I'm sure there are other people on this forum that knows much more about what to recommend. Some quick google searches shows that there are many small, cheap devices that support DLNA. The device do need a remote control of some sort, to be able to navigate media and control playback. Except for that any DLNA device should theoretically work. That said, that's not always the truth, and that can be the fault of both UMS and the device.

When it comes to deinterlacing I don't really know much either. From what I understand it's mostly a problem with NTSC SD content, which isn't very relevant for me. I don't think UMS will deinterlace by default, but as you can specify custom FFmpeg settings you can probably make make UMS do it "the manual way".