Dropouts with Minimserver via DLNA

[Martin Kasztantowicz]

I am using Hificast for years and am extremely happy with its usability and features. However, starting a couple months ago there are massive dropouts roughly every 30 seconds when using DLNA.

This is not a DNLA server issue: My server is an up to date Debian 12 server idling at 0.7% CPU peaking 4.5% at times. Minimserver is up to date as well (Version 2.2 update 258)

WLAN also cannot be the issue, there is virtually no packet loss and low latency reaching the DNLA server.

I tested a large number of players and dropouts occour only on HifiCast and on both of my two Pixel 8 Pro smartphones. BubblePNP and VNC work fine on these smartphones.

Could it be that HifiCast has an issue on Pixel smartphones with Android 15? I can't tell exactly when this issue started, but my previous Pixel smartphones didn't have any dropouts with HifiCast.

[njh...@gmail.com]

I have HiFi Cast on a Pixel 9 Pro running Android 15, and casting from a Serviio DLNA server that's running on a Raspberry Pi 4 I get no dropouts at all. My previous phone was a Pixel 8 Pro, and I didn't have the problem with it either casting from the same server, though I only had Android 14 on the 8 Pro.

[Roger Clarke]

Hi Martin,

Your comment "starting a couple of months ago" caught my eye. I have four chromecast audios which started a similar issue around the same time, having worked perfectly for many years. The CCA on my main system uses the optical output, the others the audio output, but all seemed afflicted. There would be a single "click", rather like a digital version of a vinyl click, which might repeat after a few minutes or perhaps half an hour - not massive dropouts, but maybe related.

Working round one system, I replaced in turn the CCA, the USB power cable, the USB power supply and the headphone cable, all with no change. For no particular reason, I then used a cheap and cheerful powerbank instead of the mains supply, and bingo - no more clicks!

What is more, the slight "fuzziness" which has been on the main system promptly disappeared as well. Oddly, the fuzziness would only appear playing flac files from my NAS, whereas BBC sounds always sounded perfectly clear. My system is not complex - single drive Synology NAS, isp router, minim server, hifi cast. It is hard to quantify sound quality, but I have gone from thinking that I must upgrade soon, to 100% happy.

Hope this might help someone point us in the right direction!