Module support

[appas 4]

Hey,

I am writing to request playback support for module files (.mod, .xm, .it, etc). Currently, Emby tries to play these but fails. 

There are several C# .NET libraries for mod playback, eg. SharpMik: https://github.com/thegouldfish/SharpMik

I would be interested in fulfilling this need as a plugin, but I did not find any information on how to get the currently playing audio stream into a plugin. If someone can help me with this, then maybe I will be able to write a plugin for this purpose. Or are playback decoder plugins even possible?

Alternatively, please tell me how to have Emby ignore module files in folders marked as Music. As I said, currently, mod files in my music folders get an attempted play, that results in an error message. I would primarily like to fix this error message by having a plugin that provides the playback capabilities, but if that's not possible, I would like at least to be able to avoid the error messages, which also stop playback! For reference, attached is the error I'm getting.

 

[Luke 42265]

Quote

As I said, currently, mod files in my music folders get an attempted play, that results in an error message

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[appas 4]

Ok, so here is a log of trying to play an IT (Impulse Tracker) file in the latest Linux server (4.9.3). Emby (correctly) identifies it as music, so files of this type in a music library get attempted plays, but there is failure because there isn't actually a valid decoder available. 

I would be willing to contribute such a decoder (as a .NET plugin), but I would need some guidance on how to do that. None of the plugin APIs I found deliver audio streams to the plugin to handle.

embyserver.txt

[visproduction 338]

Of interest: IT file definition:
https://docs.fileformat.com/audio/it/

[Luke 42265]

We'll just disable support for the .it extension for now. Support for it will need to be added to the server ffmpeg build before they will work.

[appas 4]

I understand if you do not want to commit resources to developing support for tracker modules (such as IT, and also MOD, XM, etc), but as I said, I would be willing to do that work for you, if you only helped me understand how. I'm thinking that since Emby supports .NET plug-ins, I should be able to write my own decoder, where I could use something like the mentioned SharpMik, or LibOpenMPT.NET ( https://github.com/Xpl0itR/LibOpenMPT.NET ) for decoding. So, there are ready-made implementations for the heavy lifting of actual decoding and playback, but what I would need to know is how to get the audio buffer from Emby into the plugin..?

[Luke 42265]

It's not that kind of work. It's a matter of getting support for these files compiled into the server ffmpeg build.

[appas 4]

So it is not possible to write a custom decoder plugin? The plugin API does not support that?

[appas 4]

If going the ffmpeg route, I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39520849/ffmpeg-loading-tracker-files

It seems there is already support in ffmpeg (probably why ffprobe recognizes them!), and it should be a simple matter of recompilation with the lib.

[Luke 42265]

26 minutes ago, appas said:

So it is not possible to write a custom decoder plugin? The plugin API does not support that?

You can't really hook an emby plugin into ffmpeg. ffmpeg is what does the raw decoding work, not emby server.