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DLNA in Bigscreen on Oculus


gihayes
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gihayes

The Bigscreen app on my Oculus is able to see and connect to Emby via DLNA but displays no content. Is it a Bigscreen issue, an Emby one, or me (something I'm not doing correctly)?

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gihayes

Thank for the assistance Luke.
I've attached the log.

I re-edited my reply to supply a better log and provide more information.

I turned on DLNA debugging and rebooted the server. I Run Emby as a service. Once the server was back up, I connected to Emby via DLNA using VLC on my phone. Played a bit of Contact".  It worked fine. I think the time begins around 2020-10-30 03:09:40.014, I Marked it.

I then opened Bigscreen on my Oculus and attempted to connect. It showed it had found Emby, I clicked it, A wheel spun for a few seconds then disappeared. The panel where content was supposed to show just says "videos will appear here" Tried several times. Same Result.

I've also attached a video of my actions while in Bigscreen.

After testing with SKYbox, another Oculus movie app, I think the problem may be with Bigscreen. Skybox was able to see and play movies from EMBY and a DNLA server running on my phone. Bigscreen didn't even see the DNLA server on my phone.

Thanks again.

 

embyserver.txt

Edited by gihayes
I edited my reply to supply a better log and provide more information.
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  • 2 weeks later...
Jbbrack03

I actually think that this might be something specific to how Emby handles DLNA. I have the same behavior in Bigscreen. My Emby server is running on a Windows 10 box. If I turn on the built-in DLNA server for Windows 10 and point it to my media directories, Bigscreen picks it up and works perfectly. So that's the exact same library, media, and server. The only difference is how Emby handles DLNA. The workaround of using the Windows 10 DLNA server is fine for movies, but it's not great for TV Shows because viewing progress is not synced with Emby. If I understand how Emby is setup, if you watch content using Emby's DLNA, it should update the viewing progress (or bookmark viewing progress) in Emby. Is this correct?

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Jbbrack03
13 minutes ago, Luke said:

Does bigscreen have a specific list of media formats that it supports?

They don't have a full structured list that I can find. But they do support MP4 and MKV containers for sure. I posted this issue on their discord and they seemed surprised that Emby wasn't working as a backend. Their lead dev said: "I don't use Emby myself, but Bigscreen should work with any DLNA server that strictly adheres to the DLNA API as we use the official schema files". 

It is a strange issue because I'm only having issues with Emby's DLNA implementation. Bigscreen is correctly picking up VLC DLNA, Windows 10 DLNA, and Plex DLNA. I've tested those three in addition to Emby and they're all working with the same library and files. 95% of my Library is MP4 with just a few MKV's.

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You're saying Emby shows no content. We've seen some dlna software do that in the past where if we present them with even a single unsupported audio or video file they'll stop showing any content altogether. And then other dlna software will just filter it out and ignore it.

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So what you could do as a test is setup another emby server with just a single library containing only a single video file that you know it supports. Then see if that shows up.

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Jbbrack03

Alright, I downloaded Emby on a completely separate PC running Windows 10. I setup a Library with a single MP4 video that works well on all other machines and media players. Bigscreen does pick up the new Library, but just shows a spinning loading icon and doesn't actually pull any folders or content. I did turn on DLNA debugging and general debugging. I'm not seeing anything related to DLNA in the log, but maybe I'm missing something. Anyway, it doesn't appear to be the content like you were suggesting.

embyserver (1).txt

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Jbbrack03

Alright here's another clue. I chatted a bit more with one of the Bigscreen devs on Reddit. Here's what he said:

"I know back when we were testing, we noticed some things like where certain strings would get sent in quotes by some DLNA servers, and others wouldn't put quotes around them that needed to be accommodated for, so I'm thinking it's possible that the issue something along those lines."

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12 hours ago, Jbbrack03 said:

Alright here's another clue. I chatted a bit more with one of the Bigscreen devs on Reddit. Here's what he said:

"I know back when we were testing, we noticed some things like where certain strings would get sent in quotes by some DLNA servers, and others wouldn't put quotes around them that needed to be accommodated for, so I'm thinking it's possible that the issue something along those lines."

Can you get an example?

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mklatsky

My observation has been that bout 30% of the time, Bigscreen does not even see my Emby server. When it does- the library does not load.

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Jbbrack03
9 hours ago, Luke said:

Can you get an example?

I just double checked with the Bigscreen Dev and he said that he just meant that as an example of how nuance can be impactful. He's already set it up so that strings with and without quotes should work. So it leaves us a little blind. Is there anything that we can do in terms of generating helpful logs that would shed some light on anything? I didn't seem to get any DLNA entries in Emby even after enabling DLNA debugging. Bigscreen can at least see the library, and I would have thought that there would be some log activity when Bigscreen tries to connect to it. Any ideas on how we can proceed?

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I'm sure you're not going to like this answer, but the best thing would actually be to get some kind of error log from the Bigscreen side. The reason you don't see an error in the emby server log is because the server thinks it's doing everything correctly, it's just that there's something about our xml responses that Bigscreen doesn't like. Without that help from Bigscreen, we're essentially going to be guessing.

On the emby server side of things, if you want to enable both debug logging in the server, as well as dlna debug logging in the dlna plugin options, then that will help me see how far Bigscreen gets before it gets into that error state. Sometimes that will have some clues.

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Jbbrack03

I can't generate Bigscreen logs from my Quest, but it is possible to get Bigscreen logs from the PC version of Bigscreen. I'm working on getting some PC users to recreate the issue and then share their Bigscreen logs in this thread. Hopefully it will have what you need. 

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Hey guys, I happened upon the Reddit post, and I happen to have an Index and an Emby server running.
I decided to give this a test run.

Minimal test. Boot up Bigscreen, connect to Emby for DLNA, no media was listed.
Tested with VLC on my PC, and it was able to see my DLNA content no problem.

I've attached the error logs but... there doesn't seem to be anything useful.
 

[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
Connected to server successfully
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigMediaPlayer] Shut down media player...
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Stopped...
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Stopped...

It searches for servers, finds mine, I connect to it, see that nothing shows up, then I exist Bigscreen. Nothing useful in the logs.
I've attached the full logs from the test

output_log.txt output_log2.txt

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15 hours ago, kieve said:

Hey guys, I happened upon the Reddit post, and I happen to have an Index and an Emby server running.
I decided to give this a test run.

Minimal test. Boot up Bigscreen, connect to Emby for DLNA, no media was listed.
Tested with VLC on my PC, and it was able to see my DLNA content no problem.

I've attached the error logs but... there doesn't seem to be anything useful.
 


[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
Connected to server successfully
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Can't find media player: -1
[BigMediaPlayer] Shut down media player...
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Stopped...
[BigscreenMediaPlugin] : Stopped...

It searches for servers, finds mine, I connect to it, see that nothing shows up, then I exist Bigscreen. Nothing useful in the logs.
I've attached the full logs from the test

output_log.txt 4.32 kB · 1 download output_log2.txt 2.56 kB · 1 download

Does it have any settings to make the logging more verbose? 

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Jbbrack03
53 minutes ago, Luke said:

Is it possible to ask them to add more dlna logging?

The Bigscreen team is not currently interested in working on this problem. They believe that it's something with Emby and it's not a high priority for them. And I don't believe that that's being said in a mean or uncooperative way. They are prepping to roll out some new features that will impact more of their users. Emby users make up a fairly small portion of their user base, so this bug isn't a high priority for them. So their logs probably aren't a helpful resource. The next idea is to analyze some wireshark scans and see what we get from there. There is a guy that's participating in our Reddit thread that is working on it from this angle. He's noted that when compared to DLNA from Plex, Emby's data does appear to be different. Plex is using XML over UDP and Emby appears to be using SSDP. He's planning to take a deeper look into the XML data for each to see if anything stands out. So that's where we are currently.

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Quote

They believe that it's something with Emby and it's not a high priority for them.

It very well is, it's just kind of guesswork about what is in our responses that it doesn't like.

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coolspot

Following this thread.  I just got an index and turned DLNA back on in Emby to test this out.   I had just turned  DLNA on and didn't do a lot of testing but so far the server wasn't showing up.  

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