Serviio

I was having a think the other day about having an app for ios devices for audio streaming using the serviio API so I have decided to start a discussion on this.

Firstly, I thought it would be worth outlining the reason for not supporting video streaming to ios. As far as I understand it (please do correct me if wrong) is that apple do not allow access to the GPU. In turn this means that any third party app relies on the CPU for video decoding which is very battery draining and would lead to a bad user experience. And anyway, who needs it for videos as the new media browser does a wonderful job of taking care of this!

However, the reason for suggesting an app for audio is that the mediabroswer experience for audio is nowhere near as good as in the Serviiogo App for Android. Hence an app that can handle audio like serviigo would add to the many reasons to buy serviio.

I don't know if this is possible via thirdparty apps on the app store but a dedicated app using the serviio api would in theory allow the creation and manipulation of play lists as well as queuing of songs and browsing artists whilst a song is playing.

As I said, this is only an idea I wanted to throw around. I haven't put any thought in to how the app will be made (I do do some programming myself but have never tried to make an ios app before) and really just wanted to get your views and opinions, good and bad!

Below is a list of pro's and cons for and against an APP. I'll try to keep the list updated if any suggestions and thoughts are added

Pro's for an Audio App for ios:

-Allow the easy creation of playlists
-Allow browsing of music whilst tracks are playing
-Potential to minimise app and do other things whilst song continues to play (Can do currently I believe, but can't browse web)
-Precache next few items for connection dropouts
-Another selling point for Serviio in general

Con's against an Audio App for ios:

-An app will need to be created (could be costly)
-App will need to be maintained
-No target audience for such an App?
-Difficulty in getting it in to app store?

All thoughts and suggestions welcome!

I've had a load of requests for ServiiGo for iOS, so there is demand, and I don't see why it wouldn't be accepted on the app store.

But yes, development and maintenance takes a lot of time. But that is why the API is public, so that third party devs can work on it.

Good to know the interest is there.

Do you know if I am correctly understanding the issues with video playback on ios?
IMO only benefit if an app could support video would be possible siri intergration, apart from that the new mediabrowser is brilliant

Vlc is pretty good on ios - and it interoperates moderately well with serviio. How about just fine-tuning that with a good profile, easily created playlists, etc. instead of making yet another special purpose app? With the current versions there is a very slow discovery time, but I think that is just a quirk that could be fixed with a query at startup or serviio doing more frequent announcements. It also seems to crash if it sees a listing of an mp4 video from serviio with DTS audio, but that would probably not happen with a working profile.

Is this using VLC and Serviio internally on your home network (ie Upnp) or externally (ie different network to that which serviio is on)

Whilst I agree improving the profile for this would help, the benefit to using the API would allow your library to be accessed over the internet (which upnp can't do*)

*I know bubbleupnp sort of allows it to, but its a bit of a hacked togeather solution

Vlc only works locally - but I'd rather have a generic LAN to LAN or LAN to remote device vpn/proxy than apps with weird single-purpose protocols that can only talk to their own server. If I wanted something that didn't follow standards I'd probably be using plex.

Whilst I can see where you are coming from regarding standards, I don't really think the pitfalls of Upnp are serviio's fault. Using the API to do as it was designed, allowing easy access to your media collection over an internet connection is only making it easier for the non technical of us.

But then you need a way to get things from the device that has the magic app to where you want them. With audio-only that's not too hard, I guess...

I think you may have got the wrong idea here.
The app would be for listening to your audio collection that is stored and read by your serviio server. Whether that is a computer laptop etc is up to you. If it has your music collection on it and serviio is told to see it then the idea is it would be able to transcode (if needed) and streamed using the serviio API (which uses http) to the apple device. Literally like spotify but with your own library.