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- Frequently Asked Questions -
What Databases can be used for the backend? Currently, only MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite have been actively developed. If you are interested in having another database type supported, please submit a feature request at the Source Forge project page. If you would be interested in helping out with implementing support for a database type, please email the project administrator. Why do I get HTTP 404 File Not Found errors? If you are using the Apache web server, Streamline uses special files named ".htaccess" that will redirect 404 File Not Found Errors back to Streamline and determine what action to take. In order for these .htaccess files to work properly, Apache must be configured to allow .htaccess files in the directory that Streamline is installed in. Certain distributions of Apache have give .htaccess files full permissions by default and some give no permissions by default. If you are seeing 404 errors is is likely that your installation of Apache disallows certian .htaccess privileges by default. In the docs dir of the Streamline archive there is a file called apache.conf. This file contains the necessary directives that need to be copied into your Apache configuration file (usually named http.conf or apache.conf). Please read this file and follow the directions in it. You will need to restart apache after making any changes to its configuration. If the 404 Errors persist, please submit a support request to the Streamline project. Why do I get a HTTP 401 error in XMMS? XMMS does not directly support HTTP Authentication. If Streamline is set up to authenticate Streaming, it will issue a authentication challenge to any connecting software by sending a HTTP 401 error. It is up to the client to handle this appropriately. For example Windows Media Player and Winamp pop up a user/password dialog and offer the user the option to save this information for later authentication. Currenlty, if XMMS gets a HTTP 401 Authntication challenge it just gives up and does not try to get login information from the user. As a work around, log into Streamline, click on My Account and then Streaming Options and enable the "Generate XMMS Compatible Playlsits" option. This option causes your username and password to be embedded in the playlist file by including it in the URL of the media file. Two things should be noted with this option. 1) Your, username and password will appear in plain text in the play list file, so don't distribute them. 2) If you changed your password, the playlist files will no longer work (assuming you saved them to disk). What media types does Streamline support? Curetnly, Streamline only officially supports:
This means that active development and testing has gone into supporting these media types. We have ensured that these media types act properly in all of the different services offered by streamline. In general, we think that you won't run into any major problems with properly formated media of these types. What if a particular media type I want to stream isn't explicitly supported? Streamline, mainly uses HTTP is the transport agent for streaming media files. If the media type you want to stream can be streamed over HTTP you can probably use Streamline to do it. Basically, if whatever player you use to play that media type supports HTTP streaming you should be all set. However, if a media type is not explicitly supported it is likely that certain Streamline services will not work. Extracting meta information out of a media file such as title, artist, lentgh, etc requires some specific logic that is unique to most media types. Without a specific module for decoding a particular type it is unlikely that Streamline will be able to extract this information. As such you may notice the following affects.
If you are interested in having another media type supported, please submit a feature request at the Source Forge project page. If you would be interested in helping out with implementing support for a media type, please email the project administrator. Why can't I seek to a particular time in some media files? The ability to seek to a particular time in a media stream depends mainly on two things. 1) If the media type supports seeking in a stream and 2) if your client supports seeking for that type of media stream. Seeking in a stream requires your client to ask Streamline to start streaming a file starting at a particular byte location. This can be very difficult for certain media types. Therefore, clients sometimes disable the ability to seek in a particular streaming media format. For example, with variable bit rate audio files (all OGG Vorbis and VBR encoded mp3's), seeking forward in the stream is difficult because there is no definate corelation between time and bytes, so when you want to seek ahead 20 seconds, you don't know how many bytes that is. Why don't some/any of my media files show up when I search? In order to search your media library, streamline must periodically scan it to index the files. The scan will populate the media database which is actually what gets searched. If you chose to skip the initial scan during installation then your media files were not indexed at all and will not show up in the search results. Additionally, if you add, more, or remove media files in your library, you will need to re-index your library. To do this log in with a user that has administrative privs. Under the maintenance setcion choose 'Update Media DB' and follow the instructions. Currently, the only way to index your library is to scan all of it. There are plans in the future to allow you to scan only certain directories if you know only a certain directory has changed. It should be noted that if you remove files, they will still appear in the search results until you re-index the media database. |