Subsonic Forum

Hi,

I am not sure how much this topic has been discussed previously, I can't find a complete answer in the forum so I thought I'd ask the whole question from start to finish. If there is a complete answer somewhere else please accept my apologies and feel free to re-direct me.

I installed Subsonic around 3 years ago. I'm running version 4.8 (build 3434) on a Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS), all my media libraries are on the same machine. I started with an Andrioid smartphone app and set the whole thing up to stream music over wifi and 3G. Brilliant, it works perfectly. I used the Android in my car, hooked up to the Aux input of the stereo. I set maximum bitrate to 128k and have music wherever I go. Now I'm using an iPhone 5 with iOS 7 with iSub and it's doing the same thing - it is faultless.

At home I'm able to stream to my iPhone, then play out to my music system via an Apple Airport Express. It's an excellent solution. I have an iPad 2 also iOS7 with iSub, everything works perfectly.

The next step for me is to stream ripped movies to the iPhone and iPad devices. All my movies are ripped to .m4v (H.264) using Handbrake and the files are web-optimised for streaming. I chose this file format as most devices can handle it and so processor load for transcoding would be low. Movies are stored on the WHS and I already stream them to a media centre machine running XBMC (a Raspberry Pi). My Ethernet LAN is 1G and my wifi is 802.11n with good coverage throughout my house. So far, so good.

If I try to stream a movie to either of my iOS devices using iSub (or to a Windows desktop PC browser - Chrome) then it just doesn't work. The listings on the devices are perfect, I can select a movie to play and the device opens the movie correctly. But, it stops after just a few seconds and takes a long time to start again. Lots of stuttering, it then just gives up and I have to kill the iOS app (or browser) and start again. I'm pretty sure this is not a networking issue as I am able to stream over wifi using a DLNA client on the iOS devices and over Ethernet to the PC using VLC.

I can't spot anything much in the forums that will help me but I'm wondering if the fix is somewhere in the transcoding config?

Can anyone help please?

Thanks,

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

as far as I understand, the video-streaming (from a technical point of view) on IOS doesn't work on an ongoing stream basis. This means the stream is actually broken into data-chunks or segments. Those segments (= individual small files) are then downloaded via http onto your IOS device and are there further processed.

So your video-stream needs some more preparation, e.g. you have to pipe the video through a tool called 'segmenter.exe', which does the splitting into segments. (Obviously, this needs some more setup, e.g. 'segmenter.exe' writes the data-segments into a dedicated folder ... )

You might want to have a look here as well: http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10391

I haven't found yet a convenient way to do all this with subsonic, though I do have it running in principle.

Hope this helps,
Tom