Understanding cover art for audio files/folders

General discussion about Universal Media Server (no support or requests)
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vic_55
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:40 am

Understanding cover art for audio files/folders

Post by vic_55 »

New owner of a Philips PUS7555/12 Smart TV with DLNA capability so have reached this forum as a result of discovering the UMS as a means to be able to access my music collection on my PC to play through the TV.
So far very impressed with the ease of installation of UMS and it working petty much "out of the box".

From what I can tell it seems to be using the Philips PUS TV.conf profile.

However I am puzzling over the display on the TV of the relevant cover art for the items in my collection.
I have some mp3 items that play without transcoding and will display the cover art.
However if I select to play an album which is in wav form, which should not need transcoding it plays OK but no
cover art is displayed on the TV.
Similarly if I select to play an item which is in .flac form (unsupported by the TV), UMS dutifully transcodes it so
it can be played, but again, no cover art is displayed.

Before I waste time trying to find out why I am getting cover art on only some selections, I'd like to confirm
whether the art should be displayed by the TV for all items played without transcode and additionally whether
transcoded tracks should also display the associated art.

I am really only focusing on audio tracks as I have very few video files on my server.

I am hoping someone on the forum can point me in the right direction to understand this a little better.
vic_55
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:40 am

Re: Understanding cover art for audio files/folders

Post by vic_55 »

Replying to my own post to add a little more info.

I have now copied a few of the troublesome tracks onto a USB memory stick and tried playing them from that source.
I see a similar inconsistency of cover art handling with these too. This suggests to me that the problem is more to do
with the TV rendering than the UMS serving of the files, although I do still wonder how artwork for transcoded files
is handled by UMS.

I have a feeling that the tracks successfully displaying artwork may be those that have it embedded as an ID3 tag
and that any cover.jpg, folder.jpeg or other artwork in the associated folder is simply ignored.

Does UMS preserve any embedded ID3 data when creating a transcoded version?
vic_55
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:40 am

Re: Understanding cover art for audio files/folders

Post by vic_55 »

Further quick update from me. It seems that my TV will play mp3 tracks and display embedded cover art OK, however if I use a tool such as mp3tag to embed
cover art into .wav files these images are ignored and only the default music icon is displayed while playing. So it appears that this TV only displays artwork for
file formats that it expects to find it in. The limitation I have been trying to understand is thus down to the TV and not UMS.

Hopefully this info may be useful to anyone else with this model and wondering about displayed cover art.
vic_55
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Dec 21, 2020 2:40 am

Re: Understanding cover art for audio files/folders

Post by vic_55 »

Still trying to get this to work for me. Some further discoveries:

Using media files saved on a USB stick (thus eliminating UMS completely) I confirmed that MP3 files with embedded artwork play fine with artwork displayed as expected. By accident (I had flac versions of the same tracks on the USB stick, also with embedded art) I found that, despite not being supported according to
Philips, it played the flac tracks just fine, but no artwork was displayed.

Having found .flac tracks played OK via the USB port, I tried restarting the UMS and selecting a .flac file to play. Looking at the UMS log files I see this was identified by UMS as an unsupported format and transcoded to .wav to play on the TV. I then stopped the UMS and modified the .conf file associated with my TV to add in .flac as a supported format, restarted UMS and tried playing the .flac track again... This time it played fine without any transcoding required... but still no artwork displayed. Finally, I tried removing the support of .flac from the .conf file and changed the transcode option from WAV to MP3. Again the flac track was identified as unsupported and transcoded, this time into MP3 and played fine but STILL no artwork displayed.

So it seems that playing an MP3 track with embedded art plays fine WITH artwork displayed OK, but playing a flac version, transcoded into MP3 somehow loses the artwork. I'm wondering if there is a specific ffmpeg option or flag that needs setting to enable the preservation of emedded artwork in the resultant streamed file.

Quite frustrating that this is so close to doing what I want but annoyingly stubbornly refuses to display the artwork.

I'm trying to avoid having to keep a set of MP3 versions to share alongside all the .flac versions which I prefer for quality and archival reasons.

Interestingly I have also discovered that if I use VLC to play the flac tracs to the TV as a renderer, it DOES display the artwork!
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