UPnP Network Player

[xllamas]

Hi All,

I've been working on a UPnP network player using the Chumby Hacker Board. The basic idea is to have an unobtrusive device that can stream audio from a UPnP media server on the network and is capable of decoding lossless codecs (FLAC) at 24bits 192KHz resolutions. I chose the Chumby because it has a i.MX233 CPU with great audio support. The built in audio can be used at first as a proof of concept, but more interestingly it has available on the connection header I2S interfaces that support a further 6 audio channels plus s/pdif, so the next step on my project is to build an add on card with high quality DACs.

The details of my project can be found at blog.cdm.com.mx

Any comments, ideas, improvements and help (specially with the DAC add on board) will be much appreciated.

Xavier.

[Marlowe]

Hi xllamas,

What the renderer software are you using?

I have built a UPnP renderer from a TI's BeagleBoard. The installed operating system is Ubuntu, and the renderer software is coherence.

Coherence works well in my system overall, however, it is always not bad to try different choices here.
Any recommendation is welcome.

[xllamas]

Marlowe,

I wrote a 2 piece system: The UpNP browser is written in Perl and it can run on the Chumby board or on another machine on the network, and the player and play list manager which is written in C++ using the same library as the player that comes with the Chumby board (BlueTune). You can check the details and source at blog.cdm.com.mx

Are you planning on using other dacs other than the audio on the Beagle board?

Xavier.

[Marlowe]

Hi xllamas,

Yes, my BeagleBoard is currently connected to my DAC via a USB/SPDIF converter (TI PCM2706 based). The sound under this configuration is not bad, but I am looking for a better way to the connection between the BealgeBoard and my DAC.

One of the candidates is an asynchronous USB/SPDIF converter such as Music Fidelity V-Link. In addition, retrieving the I2S directly from the BeagleBoard is possibly even better.

In this aspect, the Chumby Hacker looks better for its built-in SPDIF output.

By the way, why did you develop the UPnP software from scratch, rather than to integrate the open source packages?

[xllamas]

Yes, the Chumby has SPDIF and 6 channel I2S. The next step in my project is a DAC board that interfaces with the I2S on the Chumby. The reason I wrote the software (I wouldn't say from scratch as I used existing libraries) is mainly because of performance and size, the Chumby is much smaller than the Beagle board (454 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 1GB SD card) and would not support a full sized distribution like Ubuntu

Xavier.