i hate Universal Media Server

[threapse]

I swear to god, the Universal Media Server is utter crap.

Granted, the interface is somewhat better than its proginator, PMS--itself a shit-stain collection of code sensibly abandoned by in-over-his-head would-be coder and Tolkien-droid shagrath. But it remains garbage, in spite of flagging updates that break more than mend.

Nailing down the settings of this app to run reliably, predictably--or at all--is like stabbing a watermelon seed with a fork on a glass plate. When it works, it does so briefly, and only on one device... or, a'hem... "renderer". Then at some random point in the future, it'll stop working on that device and begin working on another. Or, it'll crap out mid stream. Or, it'll display folder content with no thumbnails... or it'll display some of the thumbnails, but not play every other file. But hey... the icons sure are pretty (when the app actually presents them correctly, that is).

With each update I wistfully hope for improvement. Instead, something else breaks that worked before.

I got what I paid for, so I concede that much to the UMS fanboys who feel slighted on behalf of SubJunk. And to the PMS Apologists... jesus... you should just know better.

Thanks for nothing, SubJunk, et al., you UPnP hobbyist hack.

[SubJunk]

Could've at least put this in the General Discussion category I enjoyed reading it, though!

Edit: Seriously, though, we do have stability issues on certain devices, especially the devices that the developers don't own. I have a PS3 and a Panasonic TV, and access to some other devices that I do testing on, and other developers have other devices they test on, but we can't test all of them and that's why we rely on logs from our users.
If you can provide logs I'd be happy to attempt to fix the issues you're having.

[Optimus_prime]

Well, with no logs how can we help?

[Uppie]

very clear and concise description of the problem and useful suggestions on improvement as well.

[nickhere]

I do to. Cant see how this is at 5.00 with all the problem I see. Logic is simple. find the video or audio on a website. download it to hard drive convert for use with the renderer. I am tempted to learn java so i can help out. Also need to learn python because alot of kodi channels dont stream

[SubJunk]

I appreciate that you guys have been frustrated with some bugs that have affected you. I think for most people this program has had great stability and there is typically a trend towards better stability over time. We have fixed dozens of bugs that exist in this project's predecessor and will continue to nail them down.

The logic is not simple, there is a lot more to it than that, nickhere. Many renderers have their own quirks that are unique to that manufacturer, so we need to have different parts of code between Sony, Samsung, Microsoft and Panasonic, to name a few. All of them like things done differently and many need them to be done in unintuitive ways, for example some renderers will only play certain file formats if we lie to them about what the format is, for example some Blu-ray players will only play MKV files if we tell them they are MP4 files - so there are a lot of different exceptions that go into making this program work smoothly for every device.

This and more is why we rely on users to give us logs, so we can work on ironing out the strange exceptions that devices have, and it's an ongoing thing as new ones are released all the time, and firmware updates are released for old devices (Microsoft has broken UMS support several times on the various Xboxes)

[nickhere]

thank for the explanation. I can see that how the renderers updated firmware can break the program. With million of dlna server i know it hard to keep track of changes . Just keep up the work i love what you doing.

[wiegleyj]

Here's a suggestion. PLEASE drop the java GUI and instead remake the interface as a web interface. Classical GUIs are a pain in the ass when attempting to run on a remote machine. Further more it is quite a nightmare to have UMS start automatically as a service if it is expecting to pop up a GUI over X-windows. Yes, you can disable to gui but then if you need to add a library or such... you're screwed.

A web based interface would be a good classical implementation of a configuration interface intended for a background service.

[valib]

I donn't think that to make UMS fully configurable from the web interface is a good idea. I think that supervisor of the UMS server should decide which users (renderers) should have acces to the server and which folders will be available to them. To make it configurable remotely is a way how make UMS more vurnelable for attacks.

[Executioner]

I donn't think that to make UMS fully configurable from the web interface is a good idea. I think that supervisor of the UMS server should decide which users (renderers) should have acces to the server and which folders will be available to them. To make it configurable remotely is a way how make UMS more vurnelable for attacks.

It's only vulnerable to attacks if you're stupid enough to expose the web interface to the outside world through your router, and then there simply needs to be a switch to disable the config screens to various IP ranges, eg. Only allow 192.168.0.x.