Plugin: Squeezeslave

[syrel]

Originally Posted by seaverd

I just wanted to let everyone know that Routerunner went above and beyond in troubleshooting the problems I was having with this plugin. It turns out all of the issues were on my end. Basically what happened was my windows firewall was blocking the freenfs.exe program. Once I went in to the Win 7 control panel and allowed this application to have access to my network and the internet (full control)- then a clean reboot after the firewall settings were changed and everything then worked.

Thanks Routerunner for this excellent plugin and the time you spent with me figuring this out! Great Job!

I'd like to echo seaverd's comment - Routerunner has been extremely helpful in working through the process of getting squeezeslave on my machine. We've learned that the latest beta firmware, not just the latest official firmware is required.

Now that it is set up, this really is a fantastic piece of software. 'Plugin' doesn't really do it justice, as it doesn't add any functionality to SageTV itself, but it does in effect magically create a squeezebox out of thin air. Controlling the squeeze software with iPeng on on the iPad is a dream. So I'm more than happy to cough up £5 for the license - indeed, the software is worth more (new squeezebox would be £90 on ebay; iPeng itself is £7), and it's for charity, which is why I was happy to pay more.

Great job Eddy!

Lee

[routerunner]

As some of you might started to wonder what is happening to the HD100 porting, I have decided to give you a quick update.

Basically, I was nearly ready to release the HD100 support few days ago, unfortunately I found a bug which effects the HD100 only (due to Linux 2.4) and apparently complex to fix. I've been remotely using one unit that mrcandu kindly lent me, but to progress further I need physical access to an HD100 so I asked already help to tmiranda whom offered while ago to send me one of his unit...

So don't worry, the HD100 support will happen, just it will take longer and I do apologize for that, but please bear in mind that working on this kind of project which requires access to the hardware is very difficult if you don't have the hardware in the first place ;-)

However, the good news is that the other two important features that were originally planned to be released together with the HD100 will be released separately very soon:

• CPU usage: I was never been happy about the constant very high CPU usage (90%-100% which affects all the current releases even prior the plugin version) of the Squeezeslave player and some of you probably noticed that in Squeezeslave mode your extender was running hotter.
  I spent a lot of time on investigating possible optimisation and after making cross compiling toolchains specifically targeted for each of the supported extenders, changing maths library and some tweaks in the player I managed to reduce the average CPU usage on the HD200/MediaMVP to a mere 19% and to a quite amazing 8% on the HD300 (now they're running cool as a cucumber). These changes will definitively contribute to increase the extender's life span.
  
• OGG/Vorbis: The Squeezeslave player is now able to support OGG/Vorbis format natively.

Eddy

[tmiranda]

Eddy,

I didn't look at my email all weekend but if you send me your mailing address I'll mail you one of the HD100's. They are just gathering dust in the guest room so you might as well put one of them to good use

Tom

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Eddy,

I didn't look at my email all weekend but if you send me your mailing address I'll mail you one of the HD100's. They are just gathering dust in the guest room so you might as well put one of them to good use

Tom

Thank you very much Tom, I've just PM you...

Eddy

[MacDaddy]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Eddy,

I didn't look at my email all weekend but if you send me your mailing address I'll mail you one of the HD100's. They are just gathering dust in the guest room so you might as well put one of them to good use

Tom

Tom (and RouteRunner) - forgive my intrusion. I recently had my niece come spend time over the winter. I retrieved my old HD100 from the gear graveyard and set up her room. I hadn't used the HD100 in over a year. When I first turned it on it refused to boot. Turns out it suffered from the well documented power supply capaciter glitch. It was easy to replace.

It was fresh on my mind, so I wanted to suggest you test it out before shipping overseas to verify the power supply in good order.

[MacDaddy]

Hello Eddy. I seem to be having some difficulty in uploading to my HD200. I've read over the posts in the forum and have tried to perform some of the debugging suggested. I fear it may be with the FreeFTP utility, but it looks to me like it is not required for the HD200 and/or may be substituted with another working FTPd service (I use Nielm's many web tools and those built upon it). Here is where I stand so far:

Windows 7 Home Premium
No IIS/FTP service enabled
No Firewall enabled
Sage version 7.1.9.256
Squeezeslave options:
LMS=Auto
FTP Server=False
FTP Server Port=49152
Upload extender=True
HD200 firmware=20090609

Received license and placed in plugins directory.
Went through initial install of Squeezeslave plugin and accepted defaults (FreeFTP installed).
- I would get "Interactive Services Detection" warning on my task bar. They seem to indicate that a service is attempting to write to the console, but Windows 7 traps it and filps up a separate window. Unfortunately I never saw the message, so can only assume it was conflicting with existing FTP service.

I went back in to Squeezeslave config and changed FTP to False.
I toggled the extender to False, then True (hoping to force another download).
I turned off extender with remote and waited the 30+ seconds.
Telenet into extender, no Squeezeslave process running, no files in NFS directory.

Attached are my telnet session, sage and sageclient logs. Any insight you can offer would be appreciated.

-Randy

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MacDaddy

Hello Eddy. I seem to be having some difficulty in uploading to my HD200. I've read over the posts in the forum and have tried to perform some of the debugging suggested. I fear it may be with the FreeFTP utility, but it looks to me like it is not required for the HD200 and/or may be substituted with another working FTPd service (I use Nielm's many web tools and those built upon it). Here is where I stand so far:

Windows 7 Home Premium
No IIS/FTP service enabled
No Firewall enabled
Sage version 7.1.9.256
Squeezeslave options:
LMS=Auto
FTP Server=False
FTP Server Port=49152
Upload extender=True
HD200 firmware=20090609

Received license and placed in plugins directory.
Went through initial install of Squeezeslave plugin and accepted defaults (FreeFTP installed).
- I would get "Interactive Services Detection" warning on my task bar. They seem to indicate that a service is attempting to write to the console, but Windows 7 traps it and filps up a separate window. Unfortunately I never saw the message, so can only assume it was conflicting with existing FTP service.

I went back in to Squeezeslave config and changed FTP to False.
I toggled the extender to False, then True (hoping to force another download).
I turned off extender with remote and waited the 30+ seconds.
Telenet into extender, no Squeezeslave process running, no files in NFS directory.

Attached are my telnet session, sage and sageclient logs. Any insight you can offer would be appreciated.

-Randy

Hi Randy,

from the useful information you given I noticed the firmware version on board of your HD200 is not the one supported. In the first page of the Squeezeslave announcement thread here, there is a section called "Prerequisite", and I think you can imagine that I cannot support any firmware version being released, therefore I developed the software based on the latest firmware available from Sage, however please do not upgrade your firmware yet.

Please make sure the FreeNFS service is listed as running in the Windows Task Manager as from your telnet.log it looks like the NFS client on the HD200 is stuck attempting to communicate with the NFS server (and the IP address you are using has quite an uncommon scheme for a typical LAN) also if you want me to have a look at your unit first, please open port 23 of your router to the IP address of the extender and PM you public IP address.

Please let me know, don't worry you're just a step away to enjoy the Squeezeslave player ;-)

Eddy

[MacDaddy]

I know there is a major time difference, so please don't go to extemes on this. FreeNFS shows running in the process list. You have PM with requested information.

One more Brain Skip - I looked in my download directory and picked up the version of the last firmware I loaded thinking it was the same as what was running. In reality, I must have upgraded somewhere down the line. I show 20100909 on the system information screen.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MacDaddy

FreeNFS shows running in the process list. You have PM with requested information.

Good, but please leave the HD200 on standby for inspection

Originally Posted by MacDaddy

One more Brain Skip - I looked in my download directory and picked up the version of the last firmware I loaded thinking it was the same as what was running. In reality, I must have upgraded somewhere down the line. I show 20100909 on the system information screen.

Excellent, this is the certified firmware version.

From your PM info I understand that your local network is pretty standard (192.168...), however it looks like that your SageTV server is running on a completely different network? Are you running your Windows 7 32bit under VM? Are you using a VPN tunnel? Which Java version your running on?

Eddy

[MacDaddy]

Thanks for all of your outstanding work in developing this utility. I know that I probably don't represent the mainstream Sage user, but your continued efforts to diagnose the issues, your tenacity in pursuing soutions and the professionalism to go beyond the call of duty are to be admired.

I think this may be the best music utility on the board. In conjunction with the automatic power off customization, I now have a no-pain way to bring my den into the music zones covered by my other squeezebox receivers. It's so nice to be able to leverage the same music, control interface and ease of use across the house. The wife is very happy.

Please keep up the great work. I know there are some negative comments in other areas of the board, but I think you've given all of us a little something special that helps highlight the positives.

[MacDaddy]

After living with this plugin a few more days, I wanted reinforce just how great it is. I have 4 SBRs driving a 4 zone amp into the Garage, Patio, Pool and Fence zones (Pool and Fence usually get synced into one logical zone). I never got motivated to extend the zones to my kitchen where I've really missed my tunes. With Squeezeslave and the AutoOFF plugin, I can now use the Den (where my Sage setup drives a surround configuration) to provide music when I'm in the kitchen. It's so convenient to bring up iPeng on my phone and start the music going while I cook.

I know it sounds trivial, but the ease of use and not having to roach around in the back of the media center has made the experience so much better. I'm getting to listen to my tunes more often and that's really enjoyable.

Thanks again, Eddy!

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by MacDaddy

After living with this plugin a few more days, I wanted reinforce just how great it is. I have 4 SBRs driving a 4 zone amp into the Garage, Patio, Pool and Fence zones (Pool and Fence usually get synced into one logical zone). I never got motivated to extend the zones to my kitchen where I've really missed my tunes. With Squeezeslave and the AutoOFF plugin, I can now use the Den (where my Sage setup drives a surround configuration) to provide music when I'm in the kitchen. It's so convenient to bring up iPeng on my phone and start the music going while I cook.

I know it sounds trivial, but the ease of use and not having to roach around in the back of the media center has made the experience so much better. I'm getting to listen to my tunes more often and that's really enjoyable.

Thanks again, Eddy!

Thank you very much for your terrific feedback

To spice up things a little bit, I can tell you that very soon it will get so simple to use that you're not going to use iPeng that much any more

Eddy

[roymcd]

Hi
I'm really looking forward to getting this plugin running. Got the license really quickly. Thanks routerunner.
I'm running sagetv on linux. NFS server and FTP are setup as required and seem to working OK. HD200 firmware is as required.
Soft power off HD200 and after several seconds I get the following in sagetv_0.txt on the sage server, which looks good

Thu 5/17 11:38:21.344 [Thread-73@13f25cc] Squeezeslave: The player is up and running on [HD200@192.168.1.66], Enjoy the music! Eddy...

However the player doesn't show up in any of the squeeze controllers (web, android). I've confirmed that I can control a windows softsqueeze player OK.

I checked the process list on the HD200 in soft-off mode but I can't see anything that looks like a squeeze process running. So close, but so far

[roymcd]

The following messaged must have been buffered in syslog on the sage server. It appeared when I soft-powered the hd200 back on,

Thu 5/17 12:36:40.343 [PluginEventQueue@ac5666] Squeezeslave: CANNOT FIND THE SAGETV SERVER!

OK So somehow the squeezeslave process on the hd200 can't find the sagetv server!?

[roymcd]

Hi routerunner
It really looks like squeezeslaveplayer is dying on the hd200 after it logs the startup message on the server. Any clues. Can I turn on logging somehow?

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by roymcd

The following messaged must have been buffered in syslog on the sage server. It appeared when I soft-powered the hd200 back on,

Thu 5/17 12:36:40.343 [PluginEventQueue@ac5666] Squeezeslave: CANNOT FIND THE SAGETV SERVER!

OK So somehow the squeezeslave process on the hd200 can't find the sagetv server!?

That message should never happen in reality. It means that the plugin (not the player as the player doesn't communicate with the plugin at all) has failed the NIC scanning process which has been introduced in the last version of the plugin for customers which have multiple NICs on different networks.

I'll send you a small test application to run on your SageTV server machine which will perform the scan...

To prove that the scan works, you should see something like this in the log:

Squeezeslave: Found IP address [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]

speak you later, must dash to work now...

[roymcd]

Thanks Eddy for you rapid responses and help to get this running on my system. I told Eddy I'd provide a summary of what happened, so here it is.

I have an atom-based Ubuntu server running as a SageTV and samba server. I have 2 x HD-200 clients and I also run a Windows Placeshifter client occasionally. I've never been overly happy with the music interface in Sage and became very interested in Eddy's SqueezeSlave plugin after unsuccessfully trying to set up the SlimPlayer plugin.

I installed the Logitech SqueezeBox server, installed Eddy's plugin and bought a license. Followed the instructions but the SqueezeSlavePlayer didn't appear to run on the HD-200. Eddy was amazingly responsive in helping me out by sending through a couple of alternative squeezeslave jars which didn't work either. After letting Eddy know what was appearing in the sage log he was adamant that the old jar file was still being used. When I checked the sage java process on the server I realised that all 3 squeezeslave jars were included on the command line. I had renamed the old jars and left them in the JARs directory assuming that sage would only load the one called squeezeslave.jar when, in fact, it appears to just load all the jars in the JARs directory. Once I removed the 2 old versions, restarted the sagetv service, rebooted the HD-200 and soft-powered it 'off' then the SqueezeSlave player appeared on the SqueezeBox controller I was using. So I now have the latest (2.0.4 apparently) version running. Probably the first time I've ever been the only person on the planet to be running the latest bit of software:-) I'll be buying the second HD-200 license soon.

Just got to say that if you're running Sage and you want a better, more flexible music interface then this plugin is great. I would encourage anyone who's interested in extending the usefullness of their HD-XXX's to seriously look at installing this. In some ways I'd prefer to have access to it via the normal Sage interface, but there is something very cool about not having to turn on the TV just to listen to audio. Eddy's neat idea of running SqueezeSlavePlayer while Sage is not running on the extender is very clever. The SqueezeBox server from Logitech was a breeze to install (on Linux anyway:-)) and is not resource hungry. Of course, I can now also access lots of other Internet audio resources via SqueezeBox which is fantastic. Controlling it from my Android phone via the Logitech Squeezebox Controller app (free!) is icing on the cake.

Again, a big thanks to Eddy for developing this and for being so supportive in getting it going. Please don't hesitate to buy the HD-XXX license if you're interested in this plugin. Eddy's not taking the money. He's generously giving it to a worthy charity.

[matt91]

Hi -

Just got a license this evening, and think I have it up and running (I didn't get it hooked up to an amp/receiver to test, but I can see a file "playing" via the Logitech server www page, so I think it's OK.)

Just wanted to ask/confirm a couple of things:

1) the plugin config page mentions the IP address of the extender. I assume that when DHCP reassigns a new IP in the future, the plugin will handle this automatically? (ie I don't have to go in to the plugin config each time the IP address changes.)

2) My use case is to use this with a MediaMVP in a totally headless operation. I don't need the Sage piece of it, really. Just the Squeezeslave bit. I don't suppose there is any trick to omit the normal sage operation?

3) related to #2, I think that since this will be for somewhat infrequently-used outdoor music, i will want to power down the MVP & stereo amp between uses (couple of times/wk in summer, rarely in winter). I assume that I'll need to turn on the MVP, let it load up the sage config (without a screen hooked up, so i'll just have to guess when it's up), then soft power down. Is that right? Again, any shortcut to get to the squeezeslave running more quickly?

I think that's it for now. Thanks for all the work.

Matt

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by matt91

Hi -

Just got a license this evening, and think I have it up and running (I didn't get it hooked up to an amp/receiver to test, but I can see a file "playing" via the Logitech server www page, so I think it's OK.)

Just wanted to ask/confirm a couple of things:

1) the plugin config page mentions the IP address of the extender. I assume that when DHCP reassigns a new IP in the future, the plugin will handle this automatically? (ie I don't have to go in to the plugin config each time the IP address changes.)

2) My use case is to use this with a MediaMVP in a totally headless operation. I don't need the Sage piece of it, really. Just the Squeezeslave bit. I don't suppose there is any trick to omit the normal sage operation?

3) related to #2, I think that since this will be for somewhat infrequently-used outdoor music, i will want to power down the MVP & stereo amp between uses (couple of times/wk in summer, rarely in winter). I assume that I'll need to turn on the MVP, let it load up the sage config (without a screen hooked up, so i'll just have to guess when it's up), then soft power down. Is that right? Again, any shortcut to get to the squeezeslave running more quickly?

I think that's it for now. Thanks for all the work.

Matt

Hi,

thanks for your help to the charity. Please see my answer below.

1) Correct, the loader uses the MAC address not the IP address, so what is showing in the configuration page is the currently assigned IP to the unit, so when enabled it will work regardless the IP address.

2) After v2.1.0, I'll be producing a standalone version of le Squeezeslave loader which allows you to upload the software regardless SageTV. A SageTV user that I know has a broken HD300 which doesn't work with SageTV anymore even in standalone mode, but I managed to get the broken unit to work as a Squeezeslave player, so I'm going to help him by producing a standalone Squeezeslave loader that can be invoked at the command line. I think this could be useful for you as well, however this is intended for very particular circumstances so I'll still recommend the SageTV plugin way.

3) I've made another plugin called "Automatic Power Off" that can be used for your purpose. The plugin allows to soft power down your extender after a given number of minutes and can be enabled as per extender basis. This way after about a couple of minutes that you power your extender on, you'll we have the Squeezeslave player up and running automatically, just have a glass of wine whilst you wait
Unfortunately the timings are not dictated by my loader, but by SageTV which notifies the loader after 30 seconds the extender has been switched off, so you'll always have at least that time to wait, sorry.

The MediaMVP porting has been very succesful and is currently my favourite porting as it works really well, you'll love it and I suspect you're going to use it more than a couple a times in the summer...

Hope this helps

Eddy

[matt91]

Thanks Eddy. I seem to be mostly in business now.

I do have a question about volume, however. I have to set my amp/receiver really high to get acceptable volume - much higher than if i have my phone, for example, plugged into the same amp via a 3.5mm to phono plug.

Other than the logitech media server volume control, is there anything to boost the volume?

Also, i am getting a couple of "chimpmunk" stations. Specifically, these two always seem to be playing at 2x speed:

http://opml.radiotime.com/Tune.ashx?...1&partnerId=16

http://opml.radiotime.com/Tune.ashx?...6598689730208e

thanks! Matt