Universal Media Server | Forum

I just recently set up UMS 6.6.0 on a Windows 10 box. I am trying to find an audio streaming server that will play FLAC files natively without transcoding. I had been using PLEX but discovered that the FLAC files were being transcoded to MP3.

I have been comparing the playback on the Oppo BDP-83 (preferred renderer) and the Roku 3. The DAC on the Oppo is WAY better, so I would prefer to use it.

With the Oppo Player, I can browse through the files, but I can't get playback of the audio. On the Roku, the files are listed as MP3 files and not FLAC, but they are playing back.

The BDP-83 doesn't seem to mentioned specifically as a renderer (that I could find), but it does have the latest firmware from Oppo.

I don't know what the behavior of playing FLAC files on the Oppo would look like exactly. Or on the Roku 3 for that matter. How do I know that the stream is a lossless uncompressed stream or a transcoded MP3 version of the file? In my test environment, the speakers are super hi-fi and the room isn't particularly quiet so it is hard to tell by listening between a 16 bit/44.1 PCM, lossless version of the same or a 320kbps MP3.

Is there any documentation that discusses these types of features?

Thanks for any help. I don't think that I am experiencing an actual problem, which is why I haven't included log files.

Best,

Hendrik

Hello acoustics4audio,

AFAIK, the OPPO BDP-83 don't support natively FLAC format, it's why UMS transcode it to LPCM (16-bit).
http://wiki.oppodigital.com/index.php?t ... _Files_FAQ
http://watershade.net/wmcclain/BDP-83-faq.html

ROKU 3 have 2 renderers: "Roku 3 (NSP 3)" that transcode it to MP3 and the other "Roku 3 (NSP 5)" that play FLAC without transcoding.
Only your log will tell more about your renderer specificities, though you could try to force the other one and test if that work for you.

You can saw transcoding and streaming informations from reading the renderer configuration file used, or from the data in your debug.log file as well.

Hoping that helped you.

Thank you! I will do some more work testing. I don't think that server was transcoding the FLAC files for the Oppo. I will do a conversion from FLAC back to WAV and AIFF and see what happens with that.

Best,
Hendrik