OK, announcement time again: Since Andy fixed enhancement request 6626 last Friday, you can now Stream your database to your iPhone/iPod with iPeng!
Today weve got the first beta of a tool Coolio has been waiting for from the very beginning. It was his (and my) Christmas wish but now it came true in summer: Stream your library to iPhone/iTouch! OK, its still early beta and has some experimental appeal, but it works. What does it do? Well, you cant stream mp3 streams to iPhone. Still not. But iPhone can play mp3s on your server. So what iPeng does: it has a new NowPlaying plugin, called iPeng Local Playback that will give you your actual playlist as a set of mp3 files (no, you dont see that, its just a list) and you can click them to play. QuickTime will open and play back the track and all that follow. Sounds cool? Is cool. However, its still experimental, so it comes with some issues, which hopefully will be sorted out soon, but definitely for the local app: * You have to turn off the screensaver. Thats probably the biggest one. MobileSafari switches off event handling when the screen saver kicks in. The result of this is: the playlist will not advance after the currently playing track. A workaround is to unlock the screen saver manually after each track but this is not fun. :-( I do have a good idea how to fix it, but its work. iPhone simply does not support this better right now. * The skip buttons don't work for the same reason. * mp3 and AAC only. No transcoding on the server (yet). Its being worked on (bug 8808) * You still need a player connected to the server. SqueezeCenter can only manage a playlist for a player, so you need one. Can be a computer (through the mp3-stream) or SoftSqueeze (which comes with SqueezeCenter), but its needed. I filed an enhancement request (http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8803) so hopefully this will also be sorted out soon. * The Quicktime Control acts somewhat erratically on the screen. It will sometimes overlay the top menu bar. This seems to be an Apple bug. Dont know, if theyll fix it. It doesnt look good, but it does not kill any functionality, just swipe away the Playback page and it will go away, too. So how does it work? 1. Download and install the latest beta of SqueezeCenter 7.1 (build 21902 or later) 2. Download the iPeng 0.5.2 file from the Downloads page 3. Install it. If youve got iPeng 0.5.1 (only that one) installed, you can install it over the old version and then you dont need to restart the server. Have fun! HELP APPRECIATED You don't like the quirks above? You can help. This is how: 1. Write a plugin that exports the curent playlist as Quicktime playlist. The QT plugin on iPhone does not support adding more than one track at (the interface does not exist) so I cannot add up the whole list on the client side. However, if somebody wrote a tool that provides an CLI interface to request the whole current playlist as a playlist Quicktime understands, the issues with the screen saver and the skip buttons can go away. I know close to nothing about QuickTime so please don't ask me, how to do this ;-) If nobody does this, this issues will only go away with the native app. 2. Write a "stub" player (bug 8803). This would allow the use of iPeng for playing music independent of a player. Without this, this issue will not even go away on the native app. -- pippin --- see iPeng at penguinlovesmusic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=49821
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