SmartPlaylists No Longer Accessible on Yamaha Network Receiver(s) After Updating to 20.x

    First, a little background: I've been using Kodi on separate Rasberry Pi 3/4 computers for about 3 years now, having migrated from 17.x to 20.x today.

    I use Kodi as a basic music server for several Yamaha network receivers, Samsung TVs and LG TVs, and until now, it has been an ideal solution to a unique objective.

    These Yamaha receivers have network capabilities that play audio stored on DNLA servers like Kodi, including selection by playlists, artist, album, etc.


    In experimenting with Smart Playlists, I have been successful in organizing my music (about 9,000 songs) with customized tag values in the Comments and Genre fields that make it possible to generate a unique list of songs that is refreshed daily (so I don't ever hear the same song more than once a year--I know, it's a little overkill, but until now, completely possible).

    In short, I rate each song in the comment field with a 1,2,3,4 or 5, and randomly assign each song a date (as "Genre") between Jan 1 and Dec 31 ("2022-01-01" ~ "2023-12-31").

    Then, each morning, a PC wakes up and runs a short script that generates a "smart playlist" (".XSP") file with the basic parameters that exclude songs with comments with a 1 value (duplicate and songs I don't want to hear), and includes songs that are tagged with the current date in the "Genre" field (example here):

    #ThisDay.xsp:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
    <smartplaylist type="songs">
    <name>#Playlist of the Day</name>
    <match>all</match>
    <rule field="comment" operator="isnot">
    <value>1 Rating</value>
    </rule>
    <rule field="genre" operator="is">
    <value>2023-05-25</value>
    </rule>
    <order direction="ascending">title</order>
    </smartplaylist>

    For almost 2 years now, this process worked flawlessly. My various Yamaha network receivers and Samsung/LG TVs have accessed the Kodi (18.x, 19.x) DLNA/network servers, listed the database resources, and dutifully played all of the daily smart playlists songs without a problem.

    But after upgrading to 20.x (20.0 and 20.1), there is no playback: While all client devices can access and list the server libraries, none can actually play the content.

    The Yamaha receivers can list the smart playlists, but the contents of said playlists are inaccessible (actual response: "Unable to play")
    The LG TV responds: "The file cannot be recognized: Do you want to play the next file?", which is another smart playlist, which also fails.
    The Samsung TV responds: "Not Supported File Format".

    While I've tweaked numerous intenal settings in Kodi, nothing so far has worked. My only solution has been to go back to ver 19.x.

    I have tested this on both Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 servers, and the results are the same: Version 20.x is not serving up smart playlists.

    All the basic access via Artist, Album, Songs, Genres, etc. is working as expected in Ver 20.x.

    But Smart Playlists are definitely broken for these client devices in Ver 20.x.

    Thanks for reading and offering any suggestions as to what, if anything, I should look at to remedy this issue!

    Two suggestions:

    Test again with an LE12 nightly image to see if the issue exists with Kodi 21 (Omega). I'm not expecting there to be a major change between K20 and K21, but it's important to know as development is now focussed on K21 (and will soon shift to K22).

    If the issue does exist in K21 it needs to be reported to Kodi developers via the Kodi forum as changes to the DLNA code are not something that LE devs have created; all we do is bundle upstream Kodi into a convenient distro image.

    Thanks for taking the time to reply. Your suggestions are highly appreciated.

    Tonight, I tested the most recent nightly build I could find (LibreELEC-RPi4.aarch64-12.0-nightly-20240119-71b413e.img), and, as expected, the problem persists.

    I posted about this issue on the Kodi forum back in May 2023. My post got lots of views (over 125), but not a single reply. I suspect that I may have posted in the wrong sub-forum, so I re-posted tonight in the Raspberry Pi forum. So far, over 20 views, but no replies.

    I'll give it a few more days, and hopefully, someone will take it on.

    A Followup:

    I experimented with the recent nightly build ("..12.0-nightly-20240119-71b413e) some more, and my issue is "partially" resolved:

    If I remove either of the 2 rule parameters in the smart playlist request, the playlist is recognized and played by the Yamaha receiver. This is true for the new build only--It does not work with the recent official 20.3 build.

    I will adopt a solution to purge all "1-Rated " mp3s from my music database and adopt a "one-rule only" smart playlist methodology until the issue is resolved via Kodi development, if ever.

    Thanks again, Chewitt, for the suggestions.