My setup is an 800 Mhz G4 Mac with 1.25 GB of RAM as the serving machine. I had both boxes wired to a bridged 802.11g router. I don't have any 802.11b hardware, so the network should be getting 15-20 megabits per second, or so. Which should be plenty of bandwidth. I have a relatively small music library (1000 songs or so) in iTunes, mostly as 160 kbs AAC files.
The Soundbridge connected up to the iTunes share without problem, and played the AAC files great. No skipping or anything. I suspect it's a combination of the client side AAC decoding and the deeper buffer, but it just worked like it was supposed to. The Squeezebox, on the other hand, has one or two dropouts per song. It will pretty much always drop when the playlist half of the slimserver webpage refreshes. That's even using the default skin. I've tried the 5.4.0, 5.4.1 nightlies, and 6.0 nightlies and none of them helped. The 6.0 ones were horrible, lots of dropouts, and accessing the slimserver webpages was very slow and caused frequent dropouts.
I think all of this is due to server load, but I'm not about to get a new computer just for a Squeezebox. iTunes manages to stream using 2-3% CPU, while the Perl process grabs about 15-20% CPU (with 3-4% more for mov123) whie streaming to the Squeezebox. The CPU usage spikes even more when the webpages refresh. Even with the player stopped, if there is a song with a long title showing, Perl uses 10% of the CPU. Is Slimserver really just that much more of a resource hog?
I like the Squeezebox interface better in general, but one thing that bugs me is that I can't seem to get a progress bar and large text at the same time. The Soundbridge puts the progress info to the right of the text, so it's always there, regardless of text size.
I know the general low opinion of Roku around here, and I'd like to support SlimDevices, but I'm not going to by a product that doesn't work as well for me. Honestly, I doubt I'd use Slimserver with the Roko anyway, since all I'm really interested in is AAC and MP3 playback.
I'm hoping this may be all user error, but I'm coming to the end of my 30 day return period for both boxes, and need to decide here soon. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Ben Galanti [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
