This page looks at unusual issues that may occur in StreamToMe. For solutions to other problems, please consult the topics under the Troubleshooting section on our Support page.
If you are running ServeToMe on Windows 7 (or Windows Server 2008) streaming to StreamToMe on iOS 6 and you're seeing the "Loading..." message indefinitely when you try to play a file (or extremely slow loading with pauses every 10 seconds), you may have a setting named "Large Send Offload v2" enabled in your Network Adapter.
Changes in iOS 6 have made the Apple HTTP Live Streaming layer incompatible with "Large Send Offload v2". You will need to disable this feature in your network adapter.
To disable "Large Send Offload v2", perform the following steps:
Note: Network activity might be interrupted for a brief time. In most cases it is not necessary to restart your system.
Some users are seeing the username and password alert appear repeatedly in StreamToMe 3.7.2.
If you are seeing this problem, please update to 3.7.3 from the App Store (available now for iOS, pending for Mac OS X).
When running on Mac OS X 10.8, the "Require Password" checkbox will not remain checked and the server will not demand a password from clients.
The cause is a bug in Apple's Mountain Lion where applications signed with a Developer ID (like ServeToMe) are unable to read from the Keychain. Apple claim they're investigating the issue.
To work around this bug temporarily, please follow these instructions:
You should now be able to enable the password correctly in ServeToMe. If you need to change the username, you will need to repeat this process for the new username.
Your entire iTunes library should be accessible through the "Browse Music" and "Browse Video" features (see the Browsing folders and libraries in StreamToMe topic for more).
In some cases though, you may find that your iTunes library does not contain all your files or changes to your iTunes library do not appear — even after repeated reloads.
The cause of this is usually a problem where ServeToMe on your computer has selected the wrong iTunes Library XML file.
To fix the issue, press the "Change Library XML..." button in the ServeToMe window and select the correct location of your iTunes Library XML file. Note: the file could be named "iTunes Music Library.xml" or "iTunes Library.xml".
If all of your iTunes files are failing (and none of the thumbnails are loading and none of the file durations appear) then the most likely problem is that the locations ServeToMe is loading from your iTunes Library XML are invalid.
This can happen for one of two reasons:
To change the iTunes Library XML file, use the "Choose Library XML..." button in the ServeToMe window on your computer. The file may be named "iTunes Library.xml" or "iTunes Music Library.xml".
If changing file does not help, then the locations in your Library XML file may be invalid. To confirm whether the file itself is invalid, you can open the XML file in a text editor (like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on the Mac). If you scroll through the file you will see location lines that look like this:
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Users/matt/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/Music/3%20Doors%20Down/The%20Better%20Life/Kryptonite.mp3</string>
Ignore the fact that this location value starts with "file://localhost", uses "%20" instead of space characters and uses "/" instead of "\" on Windows.
Do the location values you see refer to a valid path on your computer? Specifically, is there a folder name missing between the top level and your music folder? Or does the path contain folders that no longer exist? These are the common errors that may appear in an iTunes Library XML file.
If your file does contain invalid locations, you will need to rebuild your iTunes library. The best way to do this is to follow these instructions:
but after step (4) in these instructions, open the XML file in a text editor. Look for an invalid Location string then Find and Replace the error to fix it for all Locations (remember that you should use %20 instead of the space character).
Album artwork will only appear for music files that have embedded artwork.
When iTunes downloads artwork from the App Store, it does not embed the artwork in the file. Instead, iTunes stores the artwork in a separate, external database which is not readable by StreamToMe.
On the Mac, you can use an iTunes script to tell iTunes to embed the artwork in the files instead. To do this, download:
And follow the instructions to select files and embed their artwork in them so that the artwork will appear in StreamToMe.
On Window, you can use the VBScript linked on this page:
Attempting to play some files from newer (particularly high definition) video cameras may result in a "Playback Error: File could not be played".
To fix this problem, go to the Track Settings for the file (tap the blue button at the right of the file's row in StreamToMe). From here, go into the "Transcoding options" and set the option to "Transcode all tracks". This will force live conversion of the file into a more compatible format. If you want to change this setting for all files, you can use the "Save to global settings…" button at the bottom of the "Track Settings" screen.
This problem occurs because ServeToMe does not engage its transcoding functionality automatically for these files as it detects them as fully compatible with iOS playback hardware. Unfortunately, these files are not compatible without live conversion, resulting in the playback failure. We are investigating the issue and hope to engage transcoding automatically for these files in a future server update.
The current implementation of WTV in StreamToMe is listed as "preliminary". The code is incorporated from the open source ffmpeg library but is only a couple weeks old and is not well refined and tested (it suffers from issues with longer files, aspect ratio problems and occasional frame rate problems).
As the ffmpeg library implementation improves, we will incorporate the improvements into ServeToMe.
In the meantime, converting your files to dvr-ms (right click on them in Windows Explorer and the option to do this should appear) may alleviate some of the issues.
When playing to an Apple TV via AirPlay, the TV must be switched on and connected to the Apple TV or you will get an HDCP content protection error.
StreamToMe uses an Apple AVPlayer layer to play to the Apple TV. Apple have decided that any time a player that might include video (like the AVPlayer) is playing to the Apple TV, a valid television implementing HDCP must be connected.
This restriction applies even when StreamToMe is playing audio only due to StreamToMe's reliance on the AVPlayer layer for all media.
It is not possible to play to the Apple TV from the Mac version of StreamToMe. This is a feature only offered in iOS. It is not possible for StreamToMe to circumvent these restrictions.
To stream via AirPlay, please use the iOS version of StreamToMe.
The only way to stream files from a NAS drive is to mount the drive on a computer running ServeToMe and use ServeToMe running on that computer to share a folder from the NAS.
ServeToMe is required because it is a transcoding server — it live converts all media into an HTTP live streaming format that is supported by iOS devices. Unfortunately, a NAS, a basic file server, or any other type of media streaming devices does not perform this live conversion (they generally serve the file "as is").
Further, StreamToMe requests lots of metadata about the files from ServeToMe. These metadata requests are entirely customized to StreamToMe's needs and ServeToMe has been written explicitly to support these request. The two programs are deeply inter-dependent and neither will work without the other.
The current ServeToMe implementation requires files with a known length and access to the entire data of the file from the outset. These traits are not possible with live or internet streams.
While we will work to see if we can support live or internet streams in future, we can't make any promises at this stage.