Is is planned FLAC natively in future Firmware updates

[equinoxe4]

Hello,

I've bought a Soundbridge M1001 HR from the roku internet store. It works fine with the NAS QNAP TS-201, running Twonky on it.
In the future I will convert my CDs digital to FLAC.
Now my question:
Is is planned FLAC natively to integrate in future Firmware updates?

Sorry, but I don't find a answer with the search function.

Greetings from germany

Bernd

[S80_UK]

Hello Bernd,

Welome to the forum. Generally, Roku to not make announcements of future product developments until they appear in beta software releases. There have been quite a large number of requests for native FLAC support and I am sure that Roku will consider it. However, FLAC is not the easiest decoder to integrate, and they will also be having to balance requests from existing customers against possible features that may generate greater amounts of new business (and what they can fit in the flash memory in the product).

I strongly recommend that you do rip your CDs to FLAC anyway. You can already play FLAC files with the SoundBridge products by transcoding to WAV on the server side. Twonky can do this for some platforms using a plug-in (maybe not for yours - I don't know). Also the open source Firefly server which many of us use will serve MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, etc very well and it has become a very stable and lightweight piece of software that can run on multiple platforms. It may be possible to run Firefly on the QNAP hardware, but I cannot be sure. See http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org for more info.

Good luck,

Les.

[equinoxe4]

Hello Les.,

thank you for the fast answer!
I think it's not possible to install the fireflymediaserver on my TS-201 with the original firmware, but maybe with a open source firmware. I will searching for this.

I hope, that Roku will modify the firmware to stream FLAC native.

Greetings

Bernd

Hello Bernd,

Welome to the forum. Generally, Roku to not make announcements of future product developments until they appear in beta software releases. There have been quite a large number of requests for native FLAC support and I am sure that Roku will consider it. However, FLAC is not the easiest decoder to integrate, and they will also be having to balance requests from existing customers against possible features that may generate greater amounts of new business (and what they can fit in the flash memory in the product).

I strongly recommend that you do rip your CDs to FLAC anyway. You can already play FLAC files with the SoundBridge products by transcoding to WAV on the server side. Twonky can do this for some platforms using a plug-in (maybe not for yours - I don't know). Also the open source Firefly server which many of us use will serve MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, etc very well and it has become a very stable and lightweight piece of software that can run on multiple platforms. It may be possible to run Firefly on the QNAP hardware, but I cannot be sure. See http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org for more info.

Good luck,

Les.

[DJans]

Yeah, FLAC would really be great. I am using a WL-HDD NAS system and the twonky server does not support FLAC->WAV transcoding on that platform.

So ROKU, please add the FLAC decoding feature.

[soiaf]

However, FLAC is not the easiest decoder to integrate

Bit confused here, what do you mean by this?

[S80_UK]

Hi,

I may be speaking out of turn (I'm not a decoder expert) but I had heard from others that have added FLAC into products that it was not as easy as other codecs they had worked with. Maybe that's not really the case...? I believe that you ported FLAC for the Photobridge - was it straightforward?

Les.

[soiaf]

Ah ok, I see.
You certainly have to do a bit of reading alright before you can integrate it, but its definitely not as difficult as some (though yes, it is more difficult than others).
However, this wouldn't be the case for Roku, they can just look at my source code (for the PhotoBridge) and use sections as appropriate (the PhotoBridge and SoundBridge share a lot of common code/APIs etc. apparently).
The problem is more a case of do they have the free space available in the flash memory on the SoundBridge and do they have engineers available to do the work, is it a priority etc.

[S80_UK]

The problem is more a case of do they have the free space available in the flash memory on the SoundBridge and do they have engineers available to do the work, is it a priority etc.

Exactly the points I was making...

I have to say it would be nice to have it, but not essential given that the alternative solutions (especially Firefly) handle it so well.

[yves]

The problem is more a case of do they have the free space available in the flash memory on the SoundBridge and do they have engineers available to do the work, is it a priority etc.

Exactly the points I was making...

I have to say it would be nice to have it, but not essential given that the alternative solutions (especially Firefly) handle it so well.

As some labels (see linnrecords) are selling flacs, including 24/96 ones (not sure that 802.11b will like that transcoded to wav ), it would be a nice move to support flac.

Currently all my collection is in flac and sent to the roku as wav, that's ok as long as I have "only" cd quality flacs...
Cheers,

And thanks again to the Roku team, I'm really happy my current setup

[tps]

As some labels (see linnrecords) are selling flacs, including 24/96 ones (not sure that 802.11b will like that transcoded to wav ), it would be a nice move to support flac.

Currently all my collection is in flac and sent to the roku as wav, that's ok as long as I have "only" cd quality flacs...

I have some of those Linn 24/96 FLACs also. To play on the Soundbridge, they must be resampled to 48 KHz. For highest quality, sample rate conversion is not something one wants to do on-the-fly, so it's best to create a parallel set of 48 KHz files.

Another problem is that the Soundbridge (or maybe Firefly) does not understand 24/48, so you must dither the files down to 16/48 play on the Soundbridge. Not sure that I really understand this limitation, because either truncating or dithering is easy to do on-the-fly. Depending on the architecture of the firmware on the Soundbridge, actually supporting 24 bit files might or might not be easy.

One good thing about making a parallel set of 16/48 files for the Soundbridge is that they will totally avoid the sample rate conversion noise problems on the M1001. The Linn 24/96 files, resampled to 16/48, are some of the best sounding audio that the M1001 will reproduce.

One other thing I should mention regarding 16/48 for the M1001, if you're considering getting The Beatles "Love", go for the edition that has the DVD. It has a complete copy of the album at 16/48 LPCM on the DVD which may be extracted using DVD Audio Extractor.

[tps]

There are a couple reasons why it would be nice if Roku implemented a FLAC decoder in the Soundbridge:

1. It would reduce network traffic.
2. The "pause" would work right. Currently, when Firefly transcodes FLAC, after un-pausing the Soundbridge, Firefly furiously decodes the first part of the file to the bit-bin in order to skip to the point where play is supposed to start. It may or may not get there before the Soundbridge gives up waiting. This is especially annoying since there's no Stop button on the Soundbridge. People tell me you don't need one, that pause is effectively a Stop button. It would be, if it worked right!

I was a little disapointed that they chose to implement the less capable ALAC format rather than FLAC. I guess they felt they needed to as part of their unique integration with Itunes.