Hello, first of all, thank you for the great work. I am truly amazed to see how few 3D video players exists on Oculus/Samsung platforms, even fewer being free, so...

I will not raise issues, technically speaking, but something more like design choices you made (or did not) on the upnp/dlna browsing mechanisms. Remember that I am not a developer and that I vastly ignore the specifications of dlna/upnp, even more the terminology !...

First thing is that the dlna browser "explicitly" asks for thumbnails in a way that Skybox opens a new connection, which is an "open file" (I guess) so that the server encodes a thumbnail at an arbitrary position by "reading" the file and coding a frame. On my machine, that is done by ffmpeg, but it could be mencoder or whatever.
This behaviour has a major drawback, it drains the network in a harsh way, and the server has to render many encodings in parallel while serving the folder listing, and Skybox (I still guess) gets chaotic responses and most times scrambles the thumbnails, misses some, gets unresponsive because the wi-fi (Oculus Go on my side) is full-bandwidth...

Most dlna servers does natively provides thumbnails, if not, they do provide "cover art" if there is, but the thing is that the servers does provide this service so you should "ask" for a "preview of the file" in last resort, not as the first behaviour. Or maybe is it that Skybox expects some particular file format for that (png...) ?...

I can't think of the second thing right now (Bravo!). But I know that, to conclude :
Thank you again and congratulations, you've done some impressive work on your piece of software, dlna/upnp should be like implemented by default in all video software on systems that rely on network, by nature not bearing storage, portable devices. Free software that becomes advertised by the platform, you are on your way to be the default player on vr platforms...

  • Yum replied to this.

    bumbaclaat

    First thank you for the feedback.

    In regard to the DLNA/UPnP, which DLNA servers are you referring please?
    Which SKYBOX version do you use? Have you found same issue in the previous releases?

    Right now what SKYBOX does is:
    1) If the DLNA servers provide thumbnails, SKYBOX uses them directly
    2) if the DLNA servers do not provide thumbnails, SKYBOX will ask for thumbnails
    We did this so that whatever DLNA servers you are using, you will always have the thumbnail (except sometimes certain DLNA servers doesn't provide thumbnails at all).

    Cheers,
    Yum

        Hello,

        I tried various, (Universal Media Server, Plex and minidlna) and none seemed to send thumbnails fit to the requirements of the software, I always could see "ffmpeg -ss blahblah" on my server in, say, top (Linux and MacOS). I have to say that dlna implementation lacks thumbnails/cover art on the whole platform. The only software being able to show cover art in any case being Samsung Browser (!).
        I saw there are slight differences in dlna to what is being sent as "preview" to the files : cover.art, album.art, thumbnail (actual preview), and an other I can't remember, and that what is served is (if possible) what is asked explicitely by the client. If not explicitely asked, the server defaults to none. The only server providing all types of previews I came to was Plex. But as it builds very large previews and all, this is where things get tricky : not all clients understand what is sent.

        I looked at the thumbnails that SkyBox provides both on my mac and on the go and saw they are all the same size, that size I guess, being the size of the video elements in the grid of the browser on SkyBox. As it is a fixed grid (still guessing), maybe this is why servers rarely send conformant responses, as, this being implemented by the developers of the software, some software use jpg, other png (as supposed, most do), some keep the original ratio, others shrink or crop to a constrained size, for short, I understand that being compliant to any server is a hell of flexibility and you're better off building your own, to be sure they are displayed and fit in the grid...

        [EDIT]
        One last thing, when building thumbnails for large folders, along the list, some of the thumbs get mixed. Some files get thumbnails from other files, which thumbnails are correct, so some thumbs are repeated along the list, and the only way to force SkyBox to recreate them is to purge the cache folder and reboot the device. I am not sure of that but I think this happens if I browse to some other directory while the thumbnailing is done in that previous folder. However, interestingly, you never get a thumbnail from another file in another folder.

        I am sorry I feel like I'm complaining, this is not the case, even if it looks alike. You're doing impressive work.

        Thank you...

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