I am using the Player and Commander on my Android Nexus one and connected to mysb.com. I listen to internet radio stations (almost all saved from the TuneIn Radio app) while on the move outdoors. So I stream over the mobile network. Usually it works well. This combo is superior to the tunein app which takes a good amount of time to connect, download presets, and buffer the stream before play. It can take up to half a minute before music starts playing.
BUT there is a big problem, and it might be just that it happens on my particular phone model and operators When I have good network coverage (meaning access to high-speed access technologies UMTS, HSPA, and "best" variants of Edge) I get nice playback. But when I enter an area with bad coverage where the downlink bandwidth is not sufficient to support the bitrate of the audio stream, the music starts to glitch and interrupt. At this point the behaviour is pathological: Player goes into an endless loop (repeatedly showing playing, buffering, connecting with a few percent shown), The player gets uncontrollable and does not respond to any Commander commands (like pause or power off). Only way to exit is to disconnect player from the server, and then wait to connect it again until I have better reception. Then the modem of my phone behaves crappy as well. It seems like it sticks to a certain bearer as long as it is available and there is a connection using it. So if I have the player connected with UMTS, lose coverage of that and the device switches to poorer Edge with insufficient bandwidth, it will then tend to stick to that even if I move back into UMTS coverage again! It will not switch as long as player is connected. The handling of this situation could be improved. I suggest: * If the player buffer levels drops under a certain level and where the rate of data from the network cannot sustain the playing rate then the player could pause the downloading of the stream, silence the music and give an indication to the user. * Then it can wait and monitor better network reception. When that happens the streaming can resume. Of course it is difficult to predict if you will indeed get a sufficient bitrate in your downlink beforehand, but UMTS and HSPA should do fine. Edge could be excluded since that almost never works for me. I don't know if it should also disconnect from the server, though. Any thoughts or experiences? -- undret ------------------------------------------------------------------------ undret's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=31038 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=87364 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
