DLNA search closing before clients can respond

[rslavin]

Operating System Version:
Windows 10

Popcorn Time Version:
3.10-0

Download date:
9/29/18

Expected Behaviour

DLNA devices should appear in the dropdown menu next to the "Watch Now" button.

Actual Behaviour

DLNA devices only very rarely appear. When they do, they cast fine.

Before a week ago, I had no trouble using Popcorn Time to cast by switching to either of my two TVs using the little dropdown menu on the "Watch Now" button. Recently, I built a new computer and now they show up only very rarely and seemingly randomly -- maybe once every 50 tries. My only two choices are Butter and VLC.

DLNA works fine in all other applications. For example, if I right click a video file in Explorer, the Windows 10 menu gives me a "Cast to" menu which lists all of my devices and works fine for any of them. I can also cast from Youtube in Chrome. Popcorn Time seems to be the only application having an issue.

I'm not using a VPN and my network setup is exactly as it was with my old machine, including the same static IP addresses. I've tried power cycling all of my devices, including my router, multiple times.

I can easily reproduce the issue by trying to stream anything in Popcorn time. Only on rare occasions will I be able to see my devices in the casting menu and, in such cases, they cast just fine.

Suspected Issue

I believe the issue may have to do with grunjol/dlnacasts and how it uses node-ssdp. If you check this issue in diversario/node-ssdb, you'll see that someone is having a similar issue to mine and it was resolved by adding a timeout. Basically, the dlna search is closing before any clients can respond. I'm guessing it didn't affect my old machine since it was generally slower than my new one.

If I'm correct, the problem is not actually with popcorn time, but with dlnacasts. Unfortunately, dlnacasts seems to be virtually abandoned.

[rslavin]

I confirmed the issue in grunjol/dlnacasts and went ahead and fixed the issue in my own fork. I've created pull request #844 to change the dependency in popcorn-desktop.