Re: rygel with FLAC (either Playbin or VLC)

[Jens Georg <mail jensge org>]

Hi,

> Depending on whether I use Playbin or VLC as the media player to which
> Rygel transmits audio files, the issue is not exactly the same :
> 1) With Rygel+Playbin, no file may be heard, whether MP3 or FLAC. The
> files seem to play (I can see the time line move as time goes by) but
> there is no sound. I guess this means that Playbin should be so
> configured as to recognize my HifiBerry soundcard. Are there any
> options to do that ? All I see are options regarding Gstlaunch in
> rygel.conf but I understand this configures a server, not a renderer
> (and I tried anyway to add my soundcard and flac mime-types, according
> to various tutorials, but no luck)

Sorry, I have a patch lying around to make the audio sink more 
configurable,
but I need to wrangle some documents before I can apply that upstream.

Basically what you could to is make the HifiBerry the "default" device
in ALSA if you are not using pulse underneath.

> 2) If I use VLC instead of playbin (by enabling MPRIS and disabling
> Playbin in /home/pi/.config/rygel.conf, and then launching VLC before
> Rygel), VLC reads perfectly the MP3 files but not the FLAC ones (701
> code error : illegal mime-type).
> I asked the developers of the BubbleUpnp app what should be done. They
> answered that "The fix for FLAC for this Rygel/VLC renderer  is just
> for developers to add the FLAC mime-type to the list. It's a 10s
> job.".
> I can play FLAC files from another computer to Rygel+VLC using
> Foobar2000 : as Foobar2000 changes my FLACs into WAV (or PCM?) before
> sending them to the Rpi. But BubbleUpnp does not this conversion.

Rygel uses org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.SupportedMimeTypes to query the remote
player. VLC does not expose a specific MIME type for flac, only the
generic "application/ogg":

readonly as SupportedMimeTypes = ['audio/mpeg', 'audio/x-mpeg', 
'video/mpeg', 'video/x-mpeg', 'video/mpeg-system', 
'video/x-mpeg-system', 'video/mp4', 'audio/mp4', 'video/x-msvideo', 
'video/quicktime', 'application/ogg', 'application/x-ogg', 
'video/x-ms-asf', 'video/x-ms-asf-plugin', 'application/x-mplayer2', 
'video/x-ms-wmv', 'video/x-google-vlc-plugin', 'audio/wav', 
'audio/x-wav', 'audio/3gpp', 'video/3gpp', 'audio/3gpp2', 'video/3gpp2', 
'video/divx', 'video/flv', 'video/x-flv', 'video/x-matroska', 
'audio/x-matroska', 'application/xspf+xml'];

The issue is that VLC does not offer a specific FLAC mime type via MPRIS
so that will not match up with what BubbleUPnP sends as mime type for 
the
FLAC.

I cannot test here currently with BubbleUPnP due to network 
restrictions,
can you enable Debugging in Rygel (G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all rygel -g 5) and
check what content-type BubbleUPnP is sending towards rygel? Maybe we 
need
to implement some generic matching towards application/ogg