Onkyo TX-NR609 DLNA Issues
I upgraded my AV Receiver to an Onkyo TX-NR609 earlier this year in order to join the 21st century. One of the selling points was DLNA support. This basically means I can browse and stream music hosted on my NAS (computer in the cupboard with a hard disk in), and play it directly from the amplifier.
This has replaced my need for a Squeezebox - which has served me well. The Onkyo isn't as slick as the Squeezebox, but much of the organisational issues of large media libraries come down to the media server. I'm currently using Serviio, which is pretty good, but still has some way to go.
This setup worked fine for me for a long time until very recently. My DLNA server would often be missing from the server list on the Onkyo receiver. If it did appear, I wouldn't be able to get through a whole song before it would disappear and I would not be able to select to play the next track - although the current one would finish without issue.
This suggested there wasn't an issue with the physical networking, or things crashing. Something more illusive.
I tried to hunt down solutions to Serviio DLNA servers disappearing, or issues with the Onkyo not displaying the server all the time, but to no avail. So I started to back-track some of my tinkerings with my home network over the past few weeks (as I'm not a frequent user of this functionality).
I think I've stumbled across it and thought I'd post it here for other people/reference. I recently went through an exercise to name all my "anonymous" network devices in DNS. Some devices (such as computers) will send their computer name when they obtain a network address to DHCP. Other devices, especially embedded electronics do not bother with this. This means that the DHCP is unable to register Dynamic DNS entries. Having had enough of looking at lists of random IP addresses in my log files I thought I'd force a DNS name in DHCP. I didn't bother with reserved addresses, just forced the DNS entry for the Onkyo's MAC address.
This has worked fine for all the other annoying devices on my network (Sky box, printer etc). But by removing this forced-naming I seemed to have suddenly recovered a stable DLNA server in the Onkyo's network listing. Why? Not the foggiest, I guess it's a bug in the Onkyo's DHCP response handling.
This has replaced my need for a Squeezebox - which has served me well. The Onkyo isn't as slick as the Squeezebox, but much of the organisational issues of large media libraries come down to the media server. I'm currently using Serviio, which is pretty good, but still has some way to go.
This setup worked fine for me for a long time until very recently. My DLNA server would often be missing from the server list on the Onkyo receiver. If it did appear, I wouldn't be able to get through a whole song before it would disappear and I would not be able to select to play the next track - although the current one would finish without issue.
This suggested there wasn't an issue with the physical networking, or things crashing. Something more illusive.
I tried to hunt down solutions to Serviio DLNA servers disappearing, or issues with the Onkyo not displaying the server all the time, but to no avail. So I started to back-track some of my tinkerings with my home network over the past few weeks (as I'm not a frequent user of this functionality).
I think I've stumbled across it and thought I'd post it here for other people/reference. I recently went through an exercise to name all my "anonymous" network devices in DNS. Some devices (such as computers) will send their computer name when they obtain a network address to DHCP. Other devices, especially embedded electronics do not bother with this. This means that the DHCP is unable to register Dynamic DNS entries. Having had enough of looking at lists of random IP addresses in my log files I thought I'd force a DNS name in DHCP. I didn't bother with reserved addresses, just forced the DNS entry for the Onkyo's MAC address.
This has worked fine for all the other annoying devices on my network (Sky box, printer etc). But by removing this forced-naming I seemed to have suddenly recovered a stable DLNA server in the Onkyo's network listing. Why? Not the foggiest, I guess it's a bug in the Onkyo's DHCP response handling.