Using an external player for Jukebox mode

[ccandreva]

I've made an interesting discovery: You can play any format in Jukebox mode, without actually transcoding, by making a transcoder that is actually an external player.

After having no luck with transcoding FLAC to wav to play in the Jukebox, I decided to make a fake transcoder for flac > ALSA using mplayer instead. The command is

Code: Select all

mplayer -ao alsa %s

This works perfectly, without the overhead of transcoding. Don't forget to create a link to mplayer in /var/subsonic/transcode/

Now it would be great if the web page let you directly control the Jukebox player at all; scrubber, time counter, etc. This would even be possible with an external player. I found this article on controlling mplayer from Air:
http://mchristoff.com/2009/12/using-the ... l-mplayer/

[ccandreva]

Sadly I've discovered a problem with this. While the playback works, it seems to lock up parts of the web interface. The playlist stops updating, so you can't see what you've added to the playlist until you stop the jukebox player.

[flacflac]

Interesting workaround for a problem that seems to not get much attention unfortunately. :/

Do you hear a sound glitch whenever the next track starts or is it seamless?

Thanks!

ff

[ccandreva]

I've stopped using this method because of the lockup, if you look in another thread I did figure out how to get FLAC to play without transcoding to MP3 first.