Rygel Media (DLNA) Server?

[JSeymour]

Hi There,

Recently upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Mint 17. Was running serviio on the old system. It worked, but I'm unfond of Java and it seemed kind of... "clunky." Found the Mint repos have Rygel, so I thought I'd give it a try. Did an "sudo apt-get install rygel" Thing is...

How in the blue blazes is this thing supposed to get started? There's no /etc/init.d script. "initctl list" doesn't list "rygel." I've spent about an hour looking into this and can find absolutely nothing about actually making it run. (Other than a suggested SysV init script over on the Gentoo WiKi.)

WTH, over

Thanks,
Jim

[eanfrid]

rygel is run in the background by the user. You can start it with "Alt+F2" then "rygel". Otherwise, create an additional item in the list of "start-up applications" to automatically start it when you open an X session. Instead of rygel you can also try ushare which runs as a standard daemon.

[PatH57]

ushare is ncie and no fuzz, if you like abit more control (GUI) try
https://plex.tv/

[JSeymour]

rygel is run in the background by the user. You can start it with "Alt+F2" then "rygel". Otherwise, create an additional item in the list of "start-up applications" to automatically start it when you open an X session.

Ah, that explains it. No, that's not what I wanted.

Instead of rygel you can also try ushare which runs as a standard daemon.

Superficial research, but it appears, at first blush, to be less capable than serviio?

Thanks for the follow-up.

ushare is ncie and no fuzz, if you like abit more control (GUI) try
https://plex.tv/

That looks disturbingly commercial. But thanks, I'll look into it.

Jim

[eanfrid]

I always run as far as I can from Java apps hence I never used serviio for this precise reason (and also because it is non-free BTW). ushare does everything that I want: using the dlna client of my BD player to play any multimedia file like video, music or photos on my large flat-TV and home-cinema installation. It does a better job than the poorly maintained minidlna an is in par with mediatomb for what I want.

If you don't test ushare you will never know if it fits your needs since it depends on the capabilities of the dlna client you actually use; mine (on the BD-player) supports many formats and then I do not have the need for transcoding.

[JSeymour]

I always run as far as I can from Java apps hence I never used serviio for this precise reason (and also because it is non-free BTW).

I'm not a fan of Java, either, but serviio being non-free? I was running it on my Ubuntu 10.01 LTS box and never paid anybody a penny for anything.

Dunno if I need the transcoding. I suppose I could try ushare and find out.

Jim

[JSeymour]

If you don't test ushare you will never know if it fits your needs since it depends on the capabilities of the dlna client you actually use; mine (on the BD-player) supports many formats and then I do not have the need for transcoding.

Well, I tested ushare. Neither my relatively new Samsung LCD TV nor the even newer Sony BD player appear to understand any of the file formats, which seems odd.

Jim

[eanfrid]

I'm not a fan of Java, either, but serviio being non-free? I was running it on my Ubuntu 10.01 LTS box and never paid anybody a penny for anything

serviio is not open-source (although using libraries which are) hence not free, AFAIK. The motto in free software does not stand for free beer but for openness and freedom

Edit: Sorry to read that about ushare; I can play 100% of my contents with my Samsung BD player.

[JSeymour]

serviio is not open-source (although using libraries which are) hence not free, AFAIK.

Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh. The use of the software is free, but, yes: It's not FOSS. OTOH: For a mere $25 you can buy a "Pro" license that gets you additional features. Nothing in which I'm currently terribly interested, but maybe sometime down the road...

Looks like, if I want to have a DLNA server that actually, you know, does something useful , it'll have to be serviio.

The motto in free software does not stand for free beer but for openness and freedom

Written much open source software, have you? Because I have. For longer than there's been an Internet. Literally. So please to not be trying to teach me what "free" vs. "open source" means

Edit: Sorry to read that about ushare; I can play 100% of my contents with my Samsung BD player.

Yeah, it's kind of surprising. Neither the TV nor disc player know jpegs, any video format or mp3s. They're not that old. I think the TV's... three? years old. The BD player is last year's (?) model, but was Sony's top-of-the-line at time time. (Bought it, rather than the latest-and-greatest, because the latest-and-greatest's construction is nowhere near as nice.)

I'll continue researching, but, so far, it's looking like serviio again. I cannot fault it. It did work well on my last server.

Jim

[JSeymour]

Found a FOSS solution that works: minidlna. Downloaded the source, read the README and INSTALL documents, installed the necessary additional libs and development libs, configure, make, make install. Had to create a couple directories by hand, put the config file somewhere and edit it. Manually install the init.d script. Started it up and all my media works--even a couple sample video formats that didn't work under my old serviio install

Jim

[eanfrid]

The motto in free software does not stand for free beer but for openness and freedom

Written much open source software, have you? Because I have. For longer than there's been an Internet. Literally. So please to not be trying to teach me what "free" vs. "open source" means

Yes I did. And you can never know who you are really taking to on a forum, so I made this statement because many Linux Mint users come from Windows and probably do not understand the real cultural and technical differences between "free" software and free sotfware

BTW I did talk about minidlna above but (for me) while it does a good overall job, I found it has problems to read many filenames using non-english charsets and then either (in the best case) ignores these files or just crashes on start while trying to index them. The only workaround I found was to use it in debug mode but doing so prevents it to run as a service.

[JSeymour]

The motto in free software does not stand for free beer but for openness and freedom

Written much open source software, have you? Because I have. For longer than there's been an Internet. Literally. So please to not be trying to teach me what "free" vs. "open source" means

Yes I did. And you can never know who you are really taking to on a forum, so I made this statement because many Linux Mint users come from Windows and probably do not understand the real cultural and technical differences between "free" software and free sotfware

Nah. Don't use MS-Win, other than in the course of my job--and then only for testing for the MS-Win users what works and how to do it. Never have used MS products, otherwise. (Other than MS Disc Extended BASIC, back in my CP/M days.) My O/S progression: CP/M -> AmigaDOS -> Xenix -> Unix -> Linux

BTW I did talk about minidlna above

So you did. Perhaps that's why I keyed on it. Thanks, then

but (for me) while it does a good overall job, I found it has problems to read many filenames using non-english charsets and then either (in the best case) ignores these files or just crashes on start while trying to index them. The only workaround I found was to use it in debug mode but doing so prevents it to run as a service.

I don't expect to have that problem. I'm currently using it only to allow us to display on the TV pictures (mainly) we've taken with our own devices. I don't have any plans to digitize/archive boatloads of video content.

Did you bug-report the problems with non-English characters?

Jim

[eanfrid]

Did you bug-report the problems with non-English characters?

Yes. The answer was to either use debug mode, if not renaming those files (indeed coming from a Windows machine belonging to a family member), or upgrade to a newer version. I lived a short while with debug mode and then switched to ushare for other reasons so I did not mind at this time to verify that the newer versions actually solved this problem.

Edit: versions 1.1.x solve the problem I met, indeed.

[JSeymour]

Edit: versions 1.1.x solve the problem I met, indeed.

Ah. Good I'm running v1.1.3

Jim