Jamcast

Hello,

I downloaded Jamcast like 15 minutes ago, and got it to work already. Quite awesome actually.

Ironically though, even though the installation was quick and easy, I have the same exact bug that I had with the filter I downloaded from: http://www.dsp-worx.de/ (Jan 8 2007 post).

I just spent the last two days trying to figure out how to get my itunes library to play on my 360 with that filter. I have used TVersity, Twonky, etc.

Unprotected mp4 media content downloaded from iTunes is encoded with ALAC. As far as I know, there is only one DirectShow filter that works to transcode from ALAC to MP3 over the wire, to the 360.

I am guessing that Jamcast has to deal with this issue too because the XBox cannot handle ALAC encoded MP4s.

But Jamcasat seems to have the same bug; after a song has finished playing, there is a lot of empty air after the track has finished and before the next one starts. This only seems to be an issue with ALAC encoded M4A files, and this doesn't happen with my DLNA television. ...

Also, when I installed Jamcast, by default, the XBox 360 settings do not work out of the box under the devices screen.

I had to set ForceMP3CaptureStream to True, and MP4SupportedCodecFlags to None. Again, the XBox 360 can decode M4As, but it seems to not be able to handle M4A containers with ALAC encoded media, (even with the optional media update that can be downloaded from the game marketplace). Jamcast fixes this by transcoding to MP3 from ALAC.

I would love to see the empty air problem solved. This really was a very easy setup to do. Though, I am not sure how many people with ALAC encoded M4As would have known what to look for in the device configuration.

Maybe you all could have the server detect the encoding type and the device type to automatically determine that it is supposed to transcode? Maybe this auto behavior could be configurable, (I can imagine it would not be desired in most other situations).

The info on my M4As is usually like this:
Container:

M4A: Apple iTunes AAC-LC (M4A) Audio
- mp42: MP4 v2 [ISO 14496014]
- isom: MP4 Base Media v1 [ISO 14496-12:2003]
...

Audio:
Codec mp4a: MPEG-4 AAC LC

I hope this is helpful information, and please let me know if you have any hints regarding the dead air between tracks!

I think people will love this app if they don't have to have maintain to lossless versions of their media library, one lossless version for iTunes, and another for Windows Media... (Why can't they support FLAC???!?). Sigh. Still, you would think that Apple would let the 360 and PS3 use the ALAC codecs.

Thanks!