Can Sage Transcode Music?

[mediahome]

The HD Extender does not have a codec for WMA Lossless and most of my music library is in that format. Is Sage able to transcode music on the server as it sends it to the Extender? I am hoping that there is a setting to force all music to WAV over the wire.

[sleonard]

I'm gonna bump this because all my music is also in WMA lossless.

S

[evilpenguin]

www.foobar2000.org can convert WMA loseless to FLAC which the extender can play.

[sleonard]

I have several thousand CD's already ripped and encoded. It would max my cpu 24/7 for months. Not a good option for me

S

[mediahome]

Likewise. I want to transcode the music on the fly not convert it. Sage will transcode video on the fly. How about music?

[nielm]

Sage can auto-transcode music (it transcodes FLAC and OGG to high bitrate MP2 audio for the MVP)

BUT it cannot play WMA lossless on an MVP, so the same probably applies to the HD extender.
A quick test shows that FFMPEG (sage's transcoder) does not recognise the WMA lossless format at all, and googling confirms that FFMPEG only supports basic WMA.9, and badly at that!

[mediahome]

Nielm - thanks for the info. Its not good news as it sounds like it is unlikely that we'll get WMA lossles transcoding unless FFMPEG adds it.

Another solution would be to add a UPnP music renderer to Sage. A properly implemented UPnP renderer tells the UPnP server what formats it is capable of playing and the server transcodes appropriately.

I have Sage running on WHS which serves up my music library via UPnP. The Roku attached to the stereo in the living room doesn't support WMA lossless so the server transcodes it to WAV on the fly. Works great!

Anyone know of a UPnP plugin for Sage?

Mediahome

[pleyraki]

Would you please elaborate on how a mediaMVP can play uncompressed files
with sagetv as a server? I could convert my WMAs to FLACs but then what?

Do I need to install something as a transcoder to my sagetv install? Or flac should work "out of the box". I have sageWMP already installed.

Thanks a bunch. (BTW your plugins are excellent. Well done).

Originally Posted by nielm

Sage can auto-transcode music (it transcodes FLAC and OGG to high bitrate MP2 audio for the MVP)

BUT it cannot play WMA lossless on an MVP, so the same probably applies to the HD extender.
A quick test shows that FFMPEG (sage's transcoder) does not recognise the WMA lossless format at all, and googling confirms that FFMPEG only supports basic WMA.9, and badly at that!

[gplasky]

FLAC will transcode out of the box to a MVP.

Gerry

[Olias]

FYI, Sage's FLAC implementation for HD extenders is buggy.
I don't know about the MVP, but both the HD100 and HD200 have serious problems with playing FLAC music. Using FF and RW within songs causes the extenders to hang. While playing playlists, the extenders will eventually hang.
Very frustrating, almost makes me want to get a SONOS system (almost).

It's a known issue to Sage since the HD100 was first released (I've logged a couple of support incidents with them) and they do not have a fix yet.