Serviio

I have taught and played Classical Guitar for many years. As I reach retirement I want to keep on teaching and communicating in the modern world. There is much useless software out there for this purpose already...Skype (Microsoft controlled) and a swack of other stuff just coming around into basic low quality usability for musicians.

However in the world of Linux there is much going on which is much more interesting and could in future be setup to do things that right now I can only dream of achieving on a Windows machine with limited budget and no access to a pro studio or heavy funding.

I have played around with the recording and realtime encoding capabilities of ecasound and other software in Linux...now I am playing around with the possibilities of network broadcasting from encoded recording in real time. Writing scripts to launch and setup things and even dabbling in a little simple ui building...though I am xml challenged.

Serviio seems to be a good choice on the client side of things as it can sit there and happily send multimedia to upnp devices and transcode if necessary.

On the server side of things Linux excels...
The recent changes to pulse audio are very interesting There is much that can already be done. But very little that is in a state that make sense from an end user point of view. Creating a network multimedia stream with Linux is a fairly complex task but all the tools are in place and some are far superior to anything out there in the consumer software world. In fact RealNetworks already has commercial software available for Linux to do exactly what I eventually seek to achieve.

From my standpoint audio quality and reliability is much more important than video capabilities so developing a stream server for audio first and getting it to send a decent 128 bit stream in several different formats on demand is the primary first step.

Full video capabilities can come later. Why a DLNA client you might ask...the reason is very simple being able to send to better audio equipment from a laptop or simply an Apple IPAD or other cheaper multimedia toys like the pad is a good idea.

Quality internet discoverable network streaming audio is a challenge in real time but I am sure that in the near future it will become a real possibility even for poor musicians and teachers.

erm wouldnt you be better off looking at SHOUTcast or ICEcast applications rather than serviio ?? as these are dedicated audio streaming applications. Then all you would need is WINAMP and being connected to either the internet or an internal network to pickup the streamed track.

Or are you trying to get a system so that each person can be listening to different tracks all at same time ( internal network only ) then in that case serviio as the server and XBMC as the client would be fine and work well.

"erm wouldnt you be better off looking at SHOUTcast or ICEcast applications rather than serviio ??"

Shoutcast and Ice Cast are under consideration and there is documentation in the works by others for using Linux as an http multimedia server ...so much of the work is already in place.

My thinking is more in the line of creating a local http capable net setup that music stores or teaching institutions could use The students could log in for instruction to send and receive streams in realtime. Even the music notation could be streamed in PDF or JPEG format for that matter... Obviously wider internet availability like an internet radio station is not the goal. The lag and drop would be intolerable it would be like gaming on Mars

Local ISPs would obviously be problematic and a huge part of the expense but there is no reason why any of what I am thinking about is not possible right now. It is not such a big thing to set up a secured multimedia area limited web site now a days..... a few years ago this was not the case.

Believe me using a computer to send realtime audio and video encoded and actually making the music and video at the same time is anything but trivial...in short Skype sucks for this purpose. I am not talking low bandwidth ip telephony, or internet wide low bandwidth radio/tv broadcasting.

This is essentially why the system has to be designed from the ground up using a combination of the best simple tools available.

Serviio is the most robust of all the DLNA servers that I have tried...heck it just does not crash or peg out my processor! It might crash my lan and TV sometimes but no where near as much as Tversity or Mediatomb, Twonkey, Rygel,,,etc etc! But heck my tv is a Samsung as you pointed out so..... wth who cares.
I go by reliability before I decide to keep any software on my computers. Functionality is important but I know in time Serviio will meet the task...if Oracle with the help of others does not succeed in killing off competing non sanctioned java compilers and alienating a huge swack of devs to boot ...they are trying desperately to screw over Google's apis so you can bet all the competing Linux implementations are next on their hit list. Wonder who is really footing the bill for this latest attack on Google and Linux? The financing of last great Sco effort to kill of Linux was traced back to Redmond Washington....
Just wish I were an American copyright lawyer...I could make enough money to just fish for the rest of my life that way!

Off topic but of some importance to the future of software in general ...especially Java and Linux kernel based xml capable stuff like for instance my Samsung busy-box based TV!

ok i think this is the point i jump out of this conversation and refer you to ZIP as it becomming clear to me your not intrested in serviio itself but more what can you steal from serviio to make ur own software.

Not so I have no interest in stealing squat.... I am very interested in promoting any software that could be used to promote the future of musical education and could ...even if not free be used under license. I really pity the suckers that buy a computer then pirate MS office and wonder why they have to buy a new computer every 3 years! This is why I go through the hassles of learning Linux.

Linux is not free nor is the advanced usage of most good software...pirating software is for fools and Windows users. And large corporations like some in the US.

I am simply trying hard to not re-invent the wheel, if the lug nuts cost users some cash so be it. I have nothing against Serviio becoming a commercial product.

I am not a software programmer, pirate or dev...I do what I say I will do...plain and simple.

Eric

Ok now your make no sense at all, serviio has nothing to do with musical education, all it does is allow teh user to stream DLNA content to there network.

FYI - linux is most deffinately free and so is serviio.

I thin subsonic is pretty much what you are searching for!