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Problems playing Internet streams

dave

August 15, 2014 21:56

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Hi,

What a wonderful combination Hifiberry digi and Raspbmc is. However I have now run into a problem that is a show stopper for my project. I am trying to play the high quality AAC BBC Radio streams.

Hifiberry Digi is driving an Arcam iRDAC.

Everything is fine when the signal source is a local file (MP3 or AAC) or UPnP (PC with MediaMonkey and mp3 media) the Digi output sounds great and pi's HDMI is silent.

When the source is an internet radio stream (AAC or WMA), opened either from the radio add-on or from an address in a local pls file, XBMC sends audio down the pi's HDMI route (which ultimately ends up back on the same iRDAC and plays) and there is silence on both the optical and coax outputs of the Digi.

There must be something subtle about the way audio output switching works. Perhaps this is an issue with all external sound cards, should I be posting to XBMC?

Has anyone any suggestions please?

Many thanks

Dave

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3 comments

• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team August 16, 2014 07:36

  Hi Dave,
  
  this sound like a general problem. XBMC uses different players for different kinds of media. The internet radio will use a different backend. I don't know how this has to be configured to use ALSA. Therefore I think, asking in the XBMC forum might help. Our readers here will be also interested how to do this. It would be very nice if you could post the solution here if you found one.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel
• 0
  
  dave August 16, 2014 12:03

  Thanks Daniel, I have made some progress on this now.
  
  Looking at logs I saw that OMXPlayer was being used for the AAC streams. I recalled reading something about that on this forum and discovered that it does not support the ALSA drivers. I then created a userdata/advancedsettings.xml file to use dvdplayer instead.
  
  

  
  <advancedsettings>
      <video>
          <defaultplayer>dvdplayer</defaultplayer>
          <defaultdvdplayer>dvdplayer</defaultdvdplayer>
      </video>
  </advancedsettings>
  

  
  
  After rebooting, I can now play MP3, WMA and AAC all through the Digi and everything is much as I wanted it.
  
  I will post some more details of my configuration elsewhere in the forum in due course.
  
  Many thanks
  
  Dave
  
• 0
  
  HiFiBerry team August 17, 2014 08:28

  Hi Dave,
  
  thanky for this feedback. I didn't know that the dvdplayer backend is used for internet radio. Good to know.
  
  Best regards
  Daniel