Web entries duplicate when I try to delete them

[spud]

Using Mac version 9.8.0 - for which many thanks - I was experimenting with sharing RTSP URLs of my CCTV camera and saved one as a web URL, one as a podcast and one as a live stream. None worked so I tried to delete them, which proved impossible. In fact every time I tried to delete a saved rasp url, UMS created several additional new ones so that I ended up with maybe 50 saved entries instead of the original three. I'm using Os 10.13.6 on a 2017 5k iMac and I successfully managed to share some video and audio files before my web test.

(It would have been nice to be able to select multiple Web entries and delete them all at once but I couldn't select more than one - and because the file names were the same, I couldn't tell whether it deleted or not.)

[Nadahar]

This seems like a bug for sure. Instead of waiting for a fix, if you want to get rid of them, stop UMS and open UMS.conf in a text editor. Find the lines there, and delete them. Save and start UMS, and they should be gone. I don't remember the location of UMS.conf on macOS, but I'm sure you can find that references many other places on this forum if you can't find it.

[spud]

Thank you @Nadahar. They were actually in WEB.conf (user/library/application support/UMS) and I have now deleted them.

For the record, my original 3 lines had spawned an additional 1,134 replicated lines as a consequence of trying to delete them.

[Meanwhile, any advice on my original mission would be appreciated. Is it possible to share over my LAN via UMS the live video feed from an IP CCTV camera which is streaming continuously to my Mac? In order to view the stream I use proprietary software such as SecuritySpy or Hikvision's iVMS-4200. I can also view the RTSP stream in VLC. But now that the Webvideoplugin is no longer supported by most browsers, I can't view an HTTP stream. I did find a thread here - https://www.universalmediaserver.com/fo ... ctv#p26598 - but it's inconclusive. TIA.]

[Nadahar]

Ah, my bad. Of course they are in WEB.conf

Somebody else will have to reply to what type of streams can be used, since I have never really looked into the details of how streaming of networked sources work. What I do know is that the capabilities are quite limited, and the main reason for this is that UMS has a hard time to figure out the details of the source. Files on disk is analyzed either by MediaInfo or for some types some other method, before being served. This gives UMS the information it needs to know how to handle it, determine compatibility with the renderer, make decisions on transcoding and how to present it to the renderer.

This isn't possible for networked sources unless UMS downloads the entire source first and then analyzes it. That's obviously not a viable solution, and for "streaming" sources it wouldn't even be possible. There is no standard way for sources to present this information, and there's no way to manually specify it in UMS - which means many things simply won't work. In the past there were plugins for UMS which did some of this work for specific sources, but they stopped being maintained and doesn't work for anything but quite old UMS versions.

These plugins would have to find a way to figure out the stream properties for each individual site it supported, and as this is changing as the web is "redesigned", it's a never ending task to keep updating the logic to be able to figure out the information that is needed.

This is all the information I can provide on the topic, I don't know exactly what UMS manages to figure out and not about such sources, but I suspect it's not a lot.

[spud]

Thanks for your insight. I will remain not very optimistic.

I'll try another quickie if I may: is there any way to tell UMS to downscale 4k video to 1080p before it gets to the receiving TV? At present, I am seeing a few seconds of stunning quality 4k footage on my new LG1080p TV before it starts frantically buffering. I assume that the problem is the time my TV takes to downscale the video since both UMS and my wired gigabit connection should handle 4k comfortably. Occasionally UMS just gives up and disconnects itself which again I'm inclined to blame on the TV's processor not keeping up.

[Nadahar]

You can specify the maximum resolution in the renderer configuration, so you could use that to "trick" UMS into downscaling content. But, it the TV is HD, it should already be restricted to that. I don't think it's likely that the TV will accept 4K content via UPnP and then downscale it, I think it's more likely that UMS is already doing the downscaling and that it can't keep up for some reason.

It's hopeless to speculate on the exact cause, since so many factors can potentially come into play. What is the speed of the the NIC on the TV for example? They often save money on this and just use put 100Mbps NIC's in the TVs, since that's more than enough for things like Netflix etc, which I guess it what they have in mind. For UMS it's different, because Netflix etc are encoded in advance in huge data centers, so it can be highly and efficiently compressed. UMS on the other hand, has to handle the encoding in real-time, and that's a very different matter. That typically means that you'll either have to accept very low image quality, or quite high bandwidth use. UMS doesn't really let you "tune" this much, but there are a few things you can do. You can specify custom FFmpeg and MEncoder options, but you'd have to know what you were doing, and you'd have to take into account how UMS would "combine" your custom parameters with the other parameters. It could be done through testing though, by searching the log to find the resulting command and tweak it until you got it like you wanted it. That way you could instruct them to restrict the bandwidth. Another possibility is to switch from h264 to h265 encoding, which is much heavier on the computer, but requires a little less bandwidth.

But it's not certain that the problem is the bandwidth at all, it could be a number of things. I think you'd have to create a trace log where you did one such "failed" playback. If we're lucky, it could give us a better idea of what exactly happens.

[spud]

Thanks again @Nadahar: I will experiment. I've done a fair bit of video editing but my knowledge of the different codecs is limited. But the worst that can happen is that saved entries start spontaneously replicating themselves!

The complication for UMS might be that we have two TVs connected to the network, one 4k and one 1080p, so I assumed that UMS would produce just one stream at native 4k resolution and let the TVs process it differently.

[Nadahar]

UMS will handle content for the individual renderers (TVs) individually, so that's not an issue. UMS will stream the file as-is if it can, and will transcode when it can't. The transcoding is done in real-time, so there's nothing "prepared" in advance based on what devices are on the network.

[spud]

My Transcoding Settings window is empty so not sure how I can tweak any settings.

[Nadahar]

Enable "advanced" settings.