The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all

Just installed Twoflower on my 10.6.8 osx laptop. I did this in order to get dlna/upnp functionality, because I just recently built and populated a Synology 212j NAS and am running their Media Server app on it.

So far things have been going well: my WDTV Live box sees the DLNA service and streams media flawlessly. My Android tablet (running BubbleUpnp) also streams media without any issues, navigates the library smoothly, etc. BUT... VLC for some reason seems unable to see the upnp service. I am not sure how I would enable it; I've looked around the menus and not found any obvious option switch so far.

Although the left sidebar in the main VLC window does have a menu item for Universal Plug'n'Play, clicking on it has no effect. So... I can still get at my content the hard way, by browsing the NAS disc mounted via afp. But then I don't get all the indexing features, which might be kinda handy as it's a large-ish library.

Am I just hooped because I'm stuck at 10.6.8 with my older hardware? Or is there a way to make it work? I'm pretty new to all this media serving stuff so I may be overlooking something obvious (been known to happen). Where do I start with debugging?

tia for any light shed

BTW, I did try "Enable" (menu item right-clickable on Plug-n-Play sidebar item). I Enabled and restarted VLC. No change in behaviour.

Looking in the log file I find that the error is UPNP_E_SOCKET_BIND

And looking in the VLC forum I find that several other people were seeing this same error as of Sept this year (iirc) on various platforms, so I am not sure if it's OSX-specific or not. Anyway, as of this moment I'd say VLC's implementation of UPNP client "doesn't work" in an environment where other UPNP clients (Bubble and WDTV box) work fine. So I'm stumped.

UPDATE: Tried Rincewind (2.1.1) on two different snow-leopard macs, one iMac and one laptop.

Different results so far.

On the iMac, enabled UPnP -- finally able to see the NAS, connect to it, and browse content! Took quite a while before it had assembled the library index, but it worked fine after that. Yay! However, leaving VLC idling after this experiment (no content streaming, but app still running) was a mistake. This rev appears to have a major memory leak. By 18 hours later it had eaten all available mem and accrued over 5 million pagefaults (!!!). The iMac had to be powered off -- it was paralysed by swap-hell. So I would say that Rincewind is not quite stable -- at least playing with DLNA on the Synology 212j (Media Server app from Syno).

On the laptop, less encouraging results. Attempted to enable UPnP. VLC apparently idle, no response, but then went off into outer space (spinning rainbow busy cursor) and would not respond to anything but a sig 9. I was relieved that it didn't eat all the memory on the machine before I could kill it

Summary: either there's something odd about OSX 10.6.8, or something odd about Synology's Media Server, or this rev of VLC is not yet bugfree.

I have a memory leak issue with VLC (Rincewind) and OSX 10.6.8 even when not trying to use UPnP.

If I load a playlist of, say, 20 or so mp3 files into VLC and let it run, it quickly devours all the free memory on my laptop -- down to 20M free and no other app can start up normally. If I kill VLC, then things go back to normal.

One wrinkle here: I am loading these mp3s from an afp mounted partition (from the NAS). I suppose there might be some interaction between VLC and afp library?