Playing music on video wall

[David Honey]

A number of folks have asked about using the video wall feature in the v4 firmware to play music. I found a simple way to do this, but it's not ideal. I had a folder containing all the FLAC files for a CD. I created an ISO image of that folder and then put that image in the same folder. You setup that folder to appear in the video wall by having its parent directory added as you would for a folder containing folders that contain DVD files. Now when you select the video wall icon for that CD, it starts playing the first FLAC file. However, there is no video - the screen is blank. It's a pity that it does not at least display the folder.jpg in that ISO image.

David.

[jer1956]

Does it play the tracks without gaps or losing the first part of tracks? This is a problem when playing folders of music tracks using the File Manager.

[David Honey]

I didn't pay that much attention at the time - I wasn't expecting it work at all! I'll try later in the week when I have time and see whether it chops the start of tracks.

What I was trying to setup was a music jukebox like the video wall does for videos. Under my main "audio" folder, I have a folder for each artist that contains a folder.jpg that is a picture of the artist or group, and then one or more subfolders for each album by that artist under which there is a folder.jpg showing the cd artwork. What I'd really like to do is to be able to see a wall of the artists, then choose one and see a picture of the cd artwork, and then play the album in the right track order.

Sadly, the mede8er sorts uPnP entries, so when viewing by artist/album, the order is sorted alphabetically by track name rather than the order delivered by your upnP/DLNA server. I have submitted a defect against that. My media server uses Twonky and I checked that its viwe-definitions.xml was sorting by track number and the order I see in an HTML media browser has the correct order. So the only way to do this is to browse by network or NFS since the ripped audio tracks included the track number at the start of each filename. Since you cannot create shortcuts to paths underneath shared drives or NFS mount points, this makes it non-obvious to technophobes like my wife.

I have seen quite a few folks trying to do something similar, so it would be great if the mede8er folks gave this serious consideration for the next FW release.  I'm sure it would help others.

David.

[saskir]

I would recommend that you try the firmware mod from shizzl. He has this function implemented.