tv as music player

[andbir]

Has anybody succeeded in streaming music seamlessly to the tv from some variant source like internet radio or a continously updated playlist in some player program?
Has anybody succeeded in having the tv media player play songs from a fixed playlist like a m3u specifying songs in different directories (mounted via samygo on paths such as /dtv/usb/sda4/mp3/G/Guetta/song.mp3)

Or is there an alternative media player for the tv that can do random songs from different directories or play from a continously updated stream?

On my computer i normally use software like MusicIP, Winamp, VLC, MixMeister and would of course prefer any solution involving these pieces of software over others. I suppose I could install Itunes if necessary.
Thank you for any tips or pointers.

[andbir]

I am amazed that i have had no replies to this - i thought surely someone somewhere was trying to play music on the tv through any other means than the provided media player which seems to have no support for ordered play / random play / playlists.

[sbav1]

Has anybody succeeded in streaming music seamlessly to the tv from some variant source like internet radio or a continously updated playlist in some player program?
Has anybody succeeded in having the tv media player play songs from a fixed playlist like a m3u specifying songs in different directories (mounted via samygo on paths such as /dtv/usb/sda4/mp3/G/Guetta/song.mp3)

Here is an idea how it can be done with 4 [not-so-]easy steps:
1) Set up/install DLNA server deamon directly on TV (you'll need some decent implementation, compillable for ARM platform, with arbitrailly configurable transcoding capabilities, eg.: media tomb).
2) For continuous audio playback from DLNA you'll need to create a directory with just one file, and set "Repeat Mode" to "On". Such virtual audio file will be played over and over, but each time with the different (eg. randomly chosen) content of your choice.
3) Create appropriate scripts and files to provide playing controls, like RANDOM/SHUFFLE, or NEXT / PREV for switching tracks in .m3u file; such files can be located in dedicated CONTROL subdirectory. Script execution on DLNA server side will be triggered by choosing particular file in Media Player, if you configure it so.
4) As long as audio format is MP3, TV will not know / shouldn't care if it comes from local file or remote location. AFAIK the only audio format directly playable on Samsung TVs from DLNA server is MP3; for other audio formats you may need to set up some real audio transcoding. Problem is, real-time MP3 encoding will be most likelly not possible on TV CPU (not with an acceptable audio quality). As an workaround, you may try to mux PCM audio with some fixed/looped video file (transcoding to PCM should work in real time for many audio formats). I think PCM audio will be playable through DLNA if encapsulated in (eg.) AVI/RIFF container.

Ad 1): I've tried media tomb from arm debian lenny, and (to some extent) it works on TV:
- Image transcoding: virtually any image format can be displayed on TV this way (if you don't mind waiting a couple of seconds while image gets converted to JPG on server side by TV tiny ARM CPU; in slide show mode it works fluently),
- Audio transcoding: not tested,
- Video transcoding (audio reencoding + stream remuxing) works for some lesser formats/containers, unfortunatelly it doesn't work for mkv files. Most easily available tools like ffmpeg or mencoder can in fact mux to matroska container through named pipes, but result stream (with restricted header, and without index entries) are not recognized properly by Media Player.

Good luck .

[jw1001]

The Samsung player might not support playlists, but there are others that do.
Windows Media Player 11 works with playlists.
TVersity does, too. It also does Internet Radio.

[andbir]

The Samsung player might not support playlists, but there are others that do.
Windows Media Player 11 works with playlists.
TVersity does, too. It also does Internet Radio.

Well I don't know how you mean I should use Windows Media player 11 on my Samsung TV. For one thing, my PC workstation would have to be turned on at all times, which is probably not optimal.

If anybody's interested, I have since my original posting succeeded, sort of, to have the TV play from .m3u playlists, with Twonky Media Server.
Twonky creates some virtual directory structure where all the songs from a certain playlist appear (to the TV) to be in the same directory, and the TV happily plays all the songs in this virtual directory.

(I have Twonky running on my QNAP TS-509 NAS in the kitchen 24/7 even if my PC workstation is turned off)

-andreas