Feature Complaint: PlayTo doesn't support Windows 7 certified devices

Hi folks. I wanted to update the community on a change that was driven based on the overwhelming feedback we heard. In the coming months, a Windows Update will come down which reverses the policy on media renderer devices not certified for Windows. Specifically, the Devices charm will (by default) show all media renderer devices, even those not certified for Windows.

Keep in mind, devices not certified for Windows 8 may not be compatible with modern formats used by websites and apps in the Store or playback controls such as volume, skip, or seek.

Thanks again to those who provided feedback in a constructive way. Keep it coming. We're listening.

Best,

/g 

Thank you for the thorough set of traces.

From the traces, we can see you're trying to stream a WMA file from the Music app. Since Denon does not support WMA, the file has to be transcoded real-time into LPCM. When a file is transcoded in real-time, no system can know the resulting number of bytes, so in order to support seek, it has to be time-based (we do know the duration). However, Denon also does not support time-based seeking. In Windows 8.1, we introduced a feature that emulates time-based seeking for devices that do not support it. This is really nice in that users can seek their music or videos when they previously could not.

In your case, since the Music app was already playing the song locally for a bit, we are doing "Seek Emulation" to seek the stream to the same position the Music app was last playing at. This involves sending some additional SetAVTransportURI requests to the Denon DMR. We see the Denon DMR reporting an error, "TransportStatus = ERROR_OCCURRED".  Probably this is the result of the additional SetAVTransportURI requests that we send.

That would explain why the bug does not happen when using WMP as the media controller (DMC) in Desktop. With the Desktop controller, we don't try to seek immediately after starting to play.

Looking at our code, we see that careful tuning was required to work with Denon because they often tend (incorrectly) to report an error when they are no longer in an error state. Denon tends to forget to set TransportStatus back to "OK" when it has received a new URL to play. While we tested with a wide range of devices (including some newer Denon devices) It appears that your Denon device is incompatible with this seek emulation because of the device bugs.

We are investigating potential workarounds and will get back to you via this thread. A fix will take longer, unfortunately.