Radio station server

[jackrichardson]

Firstly, great work. This works as a great addition to the pimusicbox package.

The only problem I have noticed is that it doesn't retry the connection if the radio station's server goes down. For example, last night one of LBC's m3u streams went down (it stopped working on VLC on my Windows PC as well). By this morning the stream was working on my PC again, but needed to be manually restarted on mopidy. I had been hoping this would have automatically restarted with mpd-watchdog. Is is possible for this to be improved? Many thanks

[tkem]

Dear Jack,

since switching from mpd to mopidy on my Pi "kitchen radio", I don't use mpd-watchdog any more, and I no longer really maintain it (I know, I should probably say so in the README). I wrote this since I found mpd's support for playing Internet radio streams rather unstable (which may have changed with newer versions, or may be attributed to the crappy Internet connection I was using at the time), while Mopidy worked flawlessly for me. So, I never tried it with pimusicbox (which uses Mopidy), nor do I think mpd-watchdog will improve things considerably on that platform.

However, to comment further on this issue, I'd like to take a look at the logfiles first. If you installed mpd-watchdog via the Debian package, or used the -s option, this should be in your system logs, so posting the output of

grep mpd-watchdog /var/log/syslog

would help. If you started mpd-watchdog manually, please post the output of the shell command.

Kind Regards, Thomas

[jackrichardson]

Dear Thomas,

I was under the impression that mopidy still uses mpd, however I'm sure you understand a lot more about this than I do!

My internet connection has been quite unreliable recently, and initially the radio streams were not returning after an internet disconnection without manual intervention. Before I found mpd-watchdog, my initial fix for the problem was to set mpc repeat, and in a crontab I setup an mpc next command to be executed every 20 minutes. Essentially this just ensured every 20 minutes that the radio stream was playing. I didn't really like this fix, and having the mpc next set in crontab meant that when using Spotify through pimusicbox it skipped a track every 20 minutes!

mpd-watchdog has replaced this fix perfectly. if the internet drops out, the radio now begins playing again when the internet reconnects.

With regard to proving you with the log, I installed the package manually, and being a novice, I don't know how to output a log.

The server of the radio station going down is rare, so in reality this isn't a major problem.

Jack

[tkem]

Hi Jack,

if it isn't a major problem, I'd suggest we leave it there, As I mentioned, with my personal setup mpd-watchdog didn't improve things with Mopidy, which already does a great job reliabilty-wise, being based on gstreamer. But those problems were purely client-related, I never experienced a stream server going down. So mpd-watchdog is probably the wrong tool for this particular job --- it may be possible to implement something along these lines, but I think this would be a very special use case.

Kind Regards, Thomas