101 secret Rygel tips

With the release of Rygel 0.7.3 I thought I should bring up some sort of FAQ for Rygel and especially the MediaExport plugin, since it has some features and behavior changes that might lead to confusion for long-time (and new) users:

Plugin concurrency

With the release of 0.7.4 you cannot enable both tracker and MediaExport plugins at once. If you do so, the MediaExport plugin will be shut down in favor of the tracker plugin.

Meta-data extraction

Speed
Since 0.7.3 Rygel now uses the gunp-dlna package for meta-data extraction. This is based on the gst-discoverer work by Arun and Edward from Collabora Multimedia. It is significantly faster on video files than the old home-grown meta-data extraction stuff.
Filters
Rygel no longer blindly tries to extract meta-data from everything it sees in the directories. Instead it uses a positive list of file extensions to include. In the default configuration these are:

  • Audio formats
    .mp3, .oga, .ogg, .mp4, .flac, .wav, .wma
  • Video formats
    .ogv, .ogg, .mkv, .avi, .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .ts. .wmv, .asf
  • Image formats
    .jpeg, .jpg

If your favorite format is missing, don’t hesitate to file a bug

Folder hierarchy

Since Rygel 0.5.2 there has been support for user-defined virtual folders in the MediaExport plugin. It allowed the user to browse through his media by artist and album e.g. With Rygel 0.7.3 the possibility to define those folders yourself is gone. The configuration syntax wasn’t really intuitive and easy to get wrong. We defined a set of build-in folders which resemble the folders provided by the Tracker plugin.
And since the addition of this default folders made the view of the root folder even more cluttered, I decided to move all every non-virtual folder that directly corresponds to a file-system folder into its own subfolder. In an upcoming release a configuration option to disable the display of this folder will be added.

If we missed out a folder you really need, please file a bug for it.

2 thoughts on “101 secret Rygel tips

  1. Hello,
    Rygel was working for me great on the previous ubuntu version, but after updating to ubuntu 12.04 I can not see more the system folder hierarchy on my TV. I can not find much information about this. However, due to I have the files sorted by folders I do not find useful the metadata system, do you know if is possible to go back to old configuration and show the system folder hierarchy on the tv.
    Thanks in advance

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