Bugzilla – Bug 663
Provide facility to set lame transcoding quality setting
Last modified: 2011-03-16 04:39:15 UTC
I run SlimServer on a relatively low-spec silent 500MHz x86 platform, on which it runs well and I'm generally very happy. When remote streaming over my ADSL uplink to work, however, lame is obviously used to transcode to an acceptable bitrate. This works very well. However, due to the limited power of my machine it has trouble keeping up with the required bitrate, and occasionally I get stalls in the stream. I've established this is because lame can't transcode fast enough in real-time. Experimentation shows that setting the quality via '-q 9' on appropriate lame lines lowers the overhead enough that it can easily keep up with enough for listening via headphones at work. To support this I have manually edited convert.conf to add '-q 9' to each lame command, and I have modified my nightly update script to manually apply these changes for new builds. I understand that I can instead put entries in slimserver-convert.conf, but I would end up adding entries that pretty much duplicated the whole contents of convert.conf as lame is mentioned in most places. What I would like is a player-specific setting that can specify the lame quality setting that would be used. That way, I could enter '9' for my work player and leave it at the default for other players. Alternatively, general-purpose "extra lame parameters" player setting would work (I could enter "-q 9"), but this kind of explit command-line editing is usually considered a security-risk and so may not be desirable. Anyway, I hope you can consider this as a possible enhancement for future versions. I'm very happy and can continue to use it very well by patching the convert.conf file myself, but I would expect that I'm not the only person in this situation (especially with the apparent growth of SlimServer on Link Stations and similar puny machines). Thanks for your time, and keep up the good work - lots of people appreciate it, Stuart
Created attachment 201 [details] lame quality in player settings, audio this adds the ability for a setting which appears only if the lame binary is sucessfully found. The setting defaults to 9 (which is the current hardcoded value) and allows each player to have a configured quality level.
That was quick! That patch works very well indeed for me. I applied it to a 17/11 nightly (although I had to manually apply the convert.conf patch as mine didn't have 'ape' support, I don't think), and it applied well. I've checked the operation and it does allow me to control the quality setting in addition to the bitrate, which is splendid and exactly what I was after. I've not extensively tested things like whether the settings really are per-player and whether the setting only appears when LAME is installed, but it certainly works in the way I'm using it. Again, many thanks.
its often quick when the framework is already there. sorry about the stuff. that's overhang from another feature ehancement. This will still need approval before it will make it into a nightly build. will mark this as fixed once its in cvs.
committed to cvs 18/11/04
There are 536 bugs in the database with targets of '---' that were fixed prior to new year 2006. I am setting them to targets of 6.2.1 to keep them from showing up in my queries.
Yes, I believe this can now be closed. Is that something you'd prefer me to do as the originator of the report?
Routine bug db maintenance; removing old versions which cause confusion. I apologize for the inconvenience.