Beginner’s questions : iPhoto, YouTube, Chromecast and more

[williamgomes]

Hello everyone,,
Please forgive me if this post sounds naive and / or originating in some fundamental lack of knowledge or information. That being the case don’t hesitate to let me know and remove it from the forum]


I am brand new to, and until recently a perfect layman in, all things DLNA.

As I have now started connecting a lot of objects in my house I needed to understand the capabilities of DLNA and acquire the basic operating concepts of the scheme. After several days of intensive googling I became acquainted with the basic principles and the first practical thing I did was to select UMS to make our iMacs behave as DLNA servers on our wireless home network.

Soon after I was beaming with pride when my wife congratulated me for having managed to make our iTunes libraries wirelessly accessible from our SONY TV, our PHILIPS TV or SAMSUNG Bluray player. (The fact that we have a SONOS multiroom audio system makes it perfectly pointless to access our iTunes libraries from the TVs or the Bluray but I was nevertheless happy to see my first practical configuration of DLNA in action).



UMS allowed me to access the iTunes libraries on the Macs just out of the box. No configuration was needed after installation. (The warm congratulations of my wife were therefore a bit undeserved but I chose to pass that).


Other things I have not managed to do and this is where I am seeking help, please :

1. The TVs will not display any .jpg file (photos), in particular those sitting in our iPhoto libraries *. This is something that I need to make work because it is the main purpose of linking the Macs and the TVs (and is essential for the congratulatory talk to continue, not to mention for it to finally find some genuine justification). When, on the TV, I navigate to a folder containing .jpg files, irrespective of whether they are part or not of the iPhotos library, the TV says there are no files to display. The UMS log says
“WARN Unhandled exception while resolving iPhoto Library : null “
“WARN Unhandled exception while resolving <.jpg file with photo> : null “
and sometimes
“The file <.jpg file with photo> could not be parsed. It will be hidden”

* Note : however, the Photos libraries can be displayed, no problem.

Any help available please ? Migrate from iPhoto to Photos ? What about .jpg files ?


2. Is UMS capable of making available internet content to a renderer ? For instance, can a YouTube video that I am watching in a browser on the Mac be accessed by the TV ? If yes, how ?

3. Is UMS capable of making accessible by the TV the screen of the Mac ? If yes, how ?

4. I have a Chromecast plugged into one of the TVs. To pull content out of the Macs and push it into the Chromecast I tried to use the BubbleUPnP UPnP/DLNA app on my Android phone as a controller. I didn’t obtain any results but feel I have not yet tried it sufficiently hard. Meanwhile, if any help is available …

5. More generally, in DLNA terms, I understand UMS is a server. As such, renderers and controllers can PULL media content OUT of the device where UMS is installed. But UMS cannot (correct me if I’m wrong) PUSH content to a renderer. As a Mac buff I don’t use any Windows stuff. But some reading on the internet about the DLNA capabilities of Windows Media Player made me a bit jealous. It looks like WMP is capable of detecting what renderers are around (as UMS does) and, after you select some media, you can say “Play To … <renderer>”. Wouldn’t that be nice if after installation of UMS on a Mac when you select a source the right-click contextual menu gives you a command “Play To … <renderer>” ?


Thanks in advance for any help / guidance you may be willing to pass to me on these topics.

[mik_s]

I'm no expert at UMS and others may be able to help better. the default configs can be lacking and may need to be tweaked to suit your needs but one thing we will need is trace logs to understand what is happening. follow the link in the red section above.

Internet content is something that UMS should do (at least used to if needed to use plugins however they are not supported at this time). Not something I use it for So I can't be much help there.

Pushing content to your device is possible with UMS but I believe that feature is less supported so your mileage may vary. If you click on your renderer in the status tab of UMS, a status window will open up and if supported will have controls to push and play content remotely. you should also be able to use BubbleUPnP too but haven't tried that myself.

[Nadahar]

1. The TVs will not display any .jpg file (photos), in particular those sitting in our iPhoto libraries *. This is something that I need to make work because it is the main purpose of linking the Macs and the TVs (and is essential for the congratulatory talk to continue, not to mention for it to finally find some genuine justification). When, on the TV, I navigate to a folder containing .jpg files, irrespective of whether they are part or not of the iPhotos library, the TV says there are no files to display. The UMS log says
“WARN Unhandled exception while resolving iPhoto Library : null “
“WARN Unhandled exception while resolving <.jpg file with photo> : null “
and sometimes
“The file <.jpg file with photo> could not be parsed. It will be hidden”

* Note : however, the Photos libraries can be displayed, no problem.

Any help available please ? Migrate from iPhoto to Photos ? What about .jpg files ?

Image handling in general should be quote good in UMS, albeit a bit slow under certain circumstances. There is no known problem with JPEG files that I know of. My guess is that the problem is with the "iPhotos" implementation. All this i* support was made many years ago, and aPple has since changed things many times. It's a wonder that music playback from iTunes still work to me. The problem is that all this "special aPple stuff" requires a developer that actually used macOS, with those things installed. I do not, so I have no way to even check if these things work, not to mention to fix them. I do have a macOS VM that I use for simple testing from time to time, but I don't have iTunes etc... or an aPple account for that matter. Even if I did, working on the VM is so slow that it would be a real pain.

I don't think there's anybody in the current UMS team that is in a position to deal with this, so I think you will just have to think of the iPhotos implementation as broken.

2. Is UMS capable of making available internet content to a renderer ? For instance, can a YouTube video that I am watching in a browser on the Mac be accessed by the TV ? If yes, how ?

Yes and no. Internet URL's can be specified much like "shared folders", so in that sense it is supported. That said, the support pretty much requires that the URL points to a more or less straight forward file listing. Very few internet resources does this, in fact, most are made to make it hard to pull media from them, as they want to force the users to see their ads and to spy on their behavior. So, in reality, you need specific code to handle each site, and there used to be some plugins that handled some of the more common sites like youtube. That's not something you can just make and forget though, as things keep changing (youtube for example) so that the code must be updated accordingly. Currently, both plugins that did this has been abandoned for quite a while as far as I know, and none of them works with more recent versions of UMS. In fact, since all the plugins were outdated/broken, the plugins part of the GUI has been hidden, since it just caused confusion when users tried to use those broken plugins.

3. Is UMS capable of making accessible by the TV the screen of the Mac ? If yes, how ?

No. UPnP/DLNA is about delivering media content. If you installed some software that generated a "live stream" from your desktop and made it available at some local URL, you could probably add that URL to UMS and share it. But, I don't quite see the point, as there is no way to deliver input back to the desktop, so you can't control it. In addition, my guess is that it might be quite resource hungry, depending on which format the stream was delivered in, and the quality would probably suffer as well. In short, not a intended goal of UPnP/DLNA, don't waste your time trying to do it.

4. I have a Chromecast plugged into one of the TVs. To pull content out of the Macs and push it into the Chromecast I tried to use the BubbleUPnP UPnP/DLNA app on my Android phone as a controller. I didn’t obtain any results but feel I have not yet tried it sufficiently hard. Meanwhile, if any help is available …

Chromecast doesn't support DLNA, so it's really not among the intended targets. That said, one former developer made a somewhat half-working Chromecast imlementation in UMS, but it is quite buggy. You should be able to "push" media to other devices when things line up nicely though, but there are a lot of problems when it comes to determining the format/codecs to send, since this is really resolved against BubbleUPnP and not the target device, so success or failure will depend on luck, media format/codec and the target device.

5. More generally, in DLNA terms, I understand UMS is a server. As such, renderers and controllers can PULL media content OUT of the device where UMS is installed. But UMS cannot (correct me if I’m wrong) PUSH content to a renderer. As a Mac buff I don’t use any Windows stuff. But some reading on the internet about the DLNA capabilities of Windows Media Player made me a bit jealous. It looks like WMP is capable of detecting what renderers are around (as UMS does) and, after you select some media, you can say “Play To … <renderer>”. Wouldn’t that be nice if after installation of UMS on a Mac when you select a source the right-click contextual menu gives you a command “Play To … <renderer>” ?

UMS has a very rudimentary DLNA controller built into its GUI (if you click the renderer icon on the "Status" tab, a small window opens). This implementation has never been completed as I see it, and is barely half-made. Expect a lot of bugs, and a very cumbersome way to select media files. In UMS' web interface there is something called "bump" that uses the same underlying, half-made push implementation. Using the web interface for this makes it a bit easier to select media, even though the bugs are the same. I would recommend using another controller if the target device doesn't have a controller. The best way (IMO) is to use the renderer itself to control playback though, avoiding the "man-in-the-middle" makes things easier when it comes to deciding renderer capabilities and should generally work better.

The WMP capabilities isn't really DLNA, it's "Microsoft's twist on it". It does not play ball with UMS (both parts are to blame), so you're not missing out on that part

It seems to me like you're focusing much on using the renderer as the controller. Some renderers doesn't have a control interface or has a very bad one, in which case I understand it. But, apart from those, I would really stick to using the renderer itself for control. It is the way UPnP AV/DLNA was originally designed, and even though the "3 device model" has been added to the standards, it wasn't there from the start and as such hasn't been the primary focus. The support for this varies in devices, and UMS' implementation isn't really made for it either, because (as I mentioned above) UMS tries to identify the renderer and behave in a way that works for that particular renderer. When the browsing is being done from a 3. party, much of this logic fails, as there's no way for UMS to know that the requested content is really intended for another device. As such it will often list formats or other options not valid for the actual target renderer.