Development Environment

Please note that the Twonky SDK for Android now requires Android Studio (no longer Eclipse) as a development environment, which is now state of the art for Android development. For further details please have a look at the latest developer guide.

Twonky Server

New Features

Audiobook support

From version 8.1 onwards Twonky Server supports the separation of audiobooks and music. If properly tagged, audiobooks are detected through metadata. If audiobooks cannot be detected based on metadata (e.g. not properly tagged), the user can also define shares that only contain audiobooks. Audiobooks are listed in the Music navigation tree in a separate node, called “Audiobooks”. Within this node, audiobooks are sorted by categories like artist, genre, or title.

Audiobooks are recognized by the following metadata:

- ID3v1 tags with the genre “Audiobook” (value 183)
- ID3v2 tags with the genre(s) configured by the ini file option "audiobookgenres" (case insensitive)
  - the Twonky Server settings pages allow to easily configure this list based on the genres found in the metadata of the shared music collection
- import of an iTunes database containing items tagged as “Audiobook”

This feature does not only allow to browse more easily through audiobooks, but also enables client devices/applications to avoid shuffle and provide a resume function as demonstrated in the updated webUI and in the Twonky Ref App. When beaming audiobooks, the resume feature also depends on the renderer capability to play from a certain position. Some clients, e.g. WD, do not support seek and as such cannot resume.

When a renderer queue is enabled, normally all items are appended to the queue. In case of audiobooks, the queue is first emptied before the audiobook tracks are queued.
Please note that within the folder navigation audiobooks are treated like music items.

Improvements

Significant performance improvements over earlier versions
- Initial scan time improved by up to 30%; individual scan time depends on content loaded. Largest improvements are seen with heavily tagged image files
- Adding items into the navigation tree of the server has also been improved, contributing to the overall scan time improvement and also improve restart behavior
- Restart performance improved by 68% over latest 7.2 version of Twonky Server
TLS 1.2 support
support for block-cipher in TLS for online services like Dropbox
added ini property escape_json to configure escaping of JSON feeds
"disablemf" no longer available as INI parameter - "disablemf=1" to be replaced with "enablereporting=0"
PNG images now use the file date in case the creation date is not present in the image metadata
TLS server connection now uses next available port if port is already in use
added HEVC support to mp4 scanner
added HEVC support to mpeg scanner
added INI parameter "audiobooks" holding the list of audiobook shares
added option to show filenames with or without file extension in folder view
added support for a custom HTTPS port setting in INI file
added support for pushing .ogg to WD TV Live
aggregation settings are now preserved during a rebuild database
client adaptation NO_AGGREGATION added to exclude malformed CDS from being aggregated, like Plex
dc:date is derived in long format from modification time of file if it is missing in the metadata of a file
dc:date is now provided in long format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss, if available and the client device can cope with the information
default value "1" for number of discs property removed as this led to odd results like disc 5 of 1
disabled HTTPS/TLS support as default on all platforms as this is not utilized
enhanced security for scripting access to Twonky Sever (new INI setting)
file scanner now estimates the framerate of an MPEG video, when this is not present in the metadata
file scanner now handles .dv .m4p .ogm .jps file extensions
file scanner now handles subtitle files .stl and .pjs
file scanner now scans MPEG video files with .mpv extension
for better mp4 file streaming performance Twonky Server now can reposition the moov box on-the-fly to the beginning of the file
iTunes metadata for Album, Artist, Genre and Title now overwrite embedded metadata
improved MKV-parser to find additional metadata
improved client adaptation for Naim devices
improved embedded albumart extraction for mp3 files and very large album arts
it is now possible to aggregate the "Mediatomb" server
list of servers available for aggregation is much faster updated
minimized the file eventing threads for Linux to optimize memory usage
multiuser db is now recreated in case current multiuser db could not be read
performance improvement when accessing audio file's album art
removed property res@bitrate for video files as the semantics are undefined (video bitrate or audio bitrate or ...)
server managed directories are now by default created in the user's home directory on Linux systems
signature of database is now always verified when server is started to avoid unnecessary database rebuilds when updating the Twonky Server
web UI
- web UI and settings pages can now be enabled/disabled separately (added new INI param "enablewebui")
- web UI: the beam/play icon is now only displayed if there is at least one item in the container
- webUI now contains a link to online release notes

Bug fixes

fixed issue with iOS photo access dialog being shown erroneously when only sharing music
DTCP: PS3 was not able to stream DTCP protected items provided by the mediafile plugin
DTCP: Twonky Server did not save the duration of uploaded content to the database
DTCP: fixed DLNA_PN property for DTCP protected files
DTCP: fixed seeking to the very beginning of a DTCP file
DTCP: fixed update-mechanism of SRM
DTCP: is was impossible to move DTCP content from Buffalo LS210D to Twonky Server
DTCP: the server did accept a DTCP content Get request before the AKE was finished
DTCP: updated buffer size to support 2nd generation DTCP-SRMs
INI option "compilationsdir" was also applied to files and not just to folders/directories
Twonky Server did not accept license key in lower case
Twonky Server no longer creates an unnecessary backup of db.info if it is terminated before the initial scan is completed
Twonky Server no longer registers on api.twonky.com when "enablereporting" is set to 0
fixed Roku activation localization pages
fixed a crash in the AIFF file scanner
fixed a crash while shutting down the Twonky Server (views module)
fixed a performance problem with web config UI due to periodic rpc/info_status calls
fixed a race condition between NIC changes while the server was shuting down
fixed album art not showing on certain devices (e.g. ONKYO TX-NR 809) because album art URI exceeded 127 characters
fixed cross site scripting issue in Twonky Server
fixed duration-parsing in the Matroska-filescanner
fixed issue with duplicated items in navigation tree when a share is deleted while Twonky Server is offline
fixed missing update event following a folder deletion when inotify is disabled
fixed multi-user login to webUI
fixed occasional UPnP upload failures during UPnP certification tests
fixed possible buffer overflow during navigation tree creation
fixed that "offline" changes of an aggregated server were not recognized
fixed that MKV files sometimes were shared with wrong date
fixed that aggregation servers where sending endless update events when aggregation each another
fixed that album art for aggregated items was missing
fixed that album art was delivered with mime-type application/octet-stream
fixed that byebye file was deleted when an IP address changed
fixed that embedded .png album art was handled as .jpg
fixed that in multi-user mode the shares differed from the shares in single user mode
fixed that it was not possible to change the shared folder in multi user mode
fixed that some audio files with .asf extension were treated as video content
fixed that subtitle files with capital letters for extension have not been scanned by Twonky Server
fixed that the server restarts its SSDP thread when it had received SSDP packages with wrong length
fixed that the twonky-locations.db was removed on a database rebuild together with all aggregations settings
ionice support was not correctly initialized and therefore not working
multiuser config page worked only if TLS was enabled
removed broken links in web config pages for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter
restricted permission to multi-user content led to the message "no content shared" instead of "access denied"
update Twonky Server with preserve settings on Windows did not work if installed as user process
views cache was not cleared during database rebuild
views cache was sometimes not written while aggregating other servers
web UI displayed wrong error messages when beaming to Apple TV

Known issues

LG TV Series 6 only displays video subtitles of first video in queue
Xbox One can not display photos from aggregated servers
duration calculation of MPEG2TS file is not always accurate
error in Mac OS logs for filedb-delete is actually only a warning; operation is not impacted
for ALAC files the bitrate is not always correctly parsed
UPnP inspector gets confused when Twonky Server provides multiple artist tags with different roles
occasionally, Twonky license key input results in "invalid key" on Linux systems

workaround: remove the appdata folder and try again

webUI
- sometimes webUI with Opera does not show any thumbnails
- thumbnails of some rotated images do not show up correctly in webUI
on some Windows installations using BootCamp for MAC, Twonky Server cannot be licensed. Twonky Server cannot store the entered license key and the server stays in trial mode.

QA information

CTT 2.0.3.9

MCVT 3.0.3.8

UCTT 2.0.62

LPTT 2.0.29

Twonky Client Components

New Features

added NMC_MDKEY_PLAYBACK keys for continuous media playback position
added new API NMC RPC reset_audiobook_position
added new API RPC play_from_position
added new API tm_dmrcp/dmscp_reset_audiobook_position[_async]
added new API tm_dmrcp_play_from_position2 with additional parameter nPositionBytes
audiobook support: added audiobook bookmark and object type
audiobook support: renderer play position is periodically saved for audiobooks
Twonky SDK Premium now available for Android
added support for SSO functionality on Android
added new asynchronous method variants to TSDK on iOS that use return blocks instead of listener
added support for SSO functionality for iOS

Improvements

TLS 1.2 support
support for block-cipher in TLS for online services like Dropbox
added client adaptation support to RSS by adding X-PV-CLIENTNAME header entry
added event handling to rpc API
added ini property escape_json to configure escaping of JSON feeds
added metadata to device information if a device is a TV, mobile or music player
added parent container properties to RSS response
added reason for critical error to NMC_STATE_KEY_CRITICAL_ERROR notification
enabled persistent connection for queue handler communication
enabled persistent connections for SOAP requests
improved queue playback on Kodi/XBMC
queue item bookmarks can be used to restore browse position on server
removed bookmarks for common playlists and myTwonky nodes
implemented workaround for metadata duration parsing for Lollipop devices
improved download manager to recreate download list from local server on Android
removed SHARE_ITUNES setting on Android
removed getLocalFileObjectID API on Android
added RPC helper functions for configuring Twonky stack at runtime on iOS
removed TMSOptionShareiTunes and getLocalFileObjectID APIs on iOS

Bug Fixes

Web API: well-known bookmarks were not JSON escaped
fixed JSON escape of apostrophe
fixed TLS-failure with Flickr
fixed issue where go bookmark failed if item references an invalid parent container
fixed issue where twonkylib did not start properly on mobile platforms
fixed issues with XBMC and picture beaming
fixed skipping between tracks when beaming to Samsung TV series F
deprecated cache and managedlist classes in TSDK Android
fixed multiple issues in MediaResource class on Android
cloud script authentication on iOS no longer blocks for m4a content on Dropbox
fixed issue with iOS photo access dialog being shown erroneously when only sharing music

Known Issues

LDMR with customer set UDN is treated as 3rd party DMR by remote queue handlers
LG TV Series 6 only displays video subtitles of first video in queue
Roku does not support seek for music
go_parent() sometimes does not recover the position within the parent container
local renderer setting remains disabled after setting it private in general settings on Android
async go directory may incorrectly go to server level right after startup
changes in twonky-startup.txt does not have any effect if application is upgraded in place on iOS
issues with XBMC and picture beaming
CTT fails for DMC test 7.3.26.2 (bug filed with DLNA) #won't fix
Beaming issues
- XBox360 does not support beaming online content
- cannot beam multiple items to Xbox One #won't fix#

Twonky Ref App

Twonky Ref App Android