Tag Archives: Linux

About a decade too late…

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I’m currently working on adding DVD sharing to Rygel and while doing that, I resurrected a tool I wrote in 2005 to aid the tedious process of authoring DVDs on Linux. Today I cleaned it up a bit, gitified it and pushed it to github: https://github.com/phako/authorg
Please be warned that it might kill your data if you don’t read the message boxes carefully and cancel in time (and I mean that seriously, not as a standard disclaimer).

Raspberries and Rygel

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First I have to apologize for the delay. I initially announced this in my GNOME.Asia talk almost two months ago.

TL;DR:

Raspbian and hardware-accelerated video decoding in Rygel without X. Follow brief instructions on http://rygel-project.org/raspbian/

What’s this problem?

There are already several solutions in the wild that combine Rygel and the Rasbperry Pi, be it Guacamayo or stock Raspbian. While Guacamayo provides easy server and audio renderer images, none of the existing solutions provide a video renderer.
Why’s that? Well, the RPi is (intentionally) slightly underpowered to do video decoding on the CPU. Howerver, it supports video decoding in hardware.
The issue here is that Raspbian is based on wheezy which only comes with GStreamer 0.10 while the support for hardware-based video decoding on the RPi in gstreamer-omx was only added recently to GStreamer 1.0.x. And since this is wheezy, the Rygel package that comes with it is too old to use GStreamer 1.0.

So let’s just grab the packages from sid armhf, should be working, no?

No it doesn’t. Rasbpian is basically a recompilation of Debian for ARMv5 with hard float ABI, while Debian itself is using ARMv7. So we can’t just copy packages.

So?

Well the good news is that we don’t need to do all the heavy recompiling of GStreamer. Someone already did that for us. This work is available at http://vontaene.de/raspbian-updates/ (from the raspberrypi.org forum).

And what exactly are you doing now?

We provide a Debian repository with Rygel’s packages backported to Raspbian. That’s a bit boring, you say? Indeed. This is only the beginning. There will also be a set of instructions to convert a Rasbian installation into a hardware-accelerated DLNA renderer. The first step to this is a meta-package called raspbian-dlna-renderer which depends on all the other important packages necessary for a complete environment.

What’s working right now?

First, add the following repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://rygel-project.org/raspbian wheezy/
deb-src http://rygel-project.org/raspbian wheezy/
deb http://vontaene.de/raspbian-updates/ . main

The packages on rygel-project.org are signed with my private GPG key, key id 7696ECBF. Then run apt-get update && apt-get install raspbian-dlna-renderer to get all updated and necessary packages.
I’ve modified /boot/cmdline.txt to get a screen that is as empty as possible by adding silent and logo.nologo to the kernel parameters.
You can then launch Rygel as user and play files on the RPi using Helium, gupnp-av-cp from GUPnP Tools or any other DLNA control point.

What’s next?

A next version of the meta-package will probably add auto-starting Rygel as a system service – Maybe we’ll even provide a ready-to-go image…

GNOME.Asia 2013

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A bit late for the “I’m back from this year’s GNOME.Asia” post, but well. This was the fist GNOME.Asia event I attended and even my first time in asia and it was a very interesting experience that needs repeating. It was nice to meet all those people from around this part of the world who never make it to the european conference and I was particularly pleased to meet Jiro who enabled i18n support in the GUPnP tools and to learn about the <Super>M shortcut to get the message bar. Unfortunately I couldn’t join the city tour on Sunday since I was already heading back to London then.
I did a talk on DLNA (who would have guessed that) in GNOME and some of the things that might come: Slides of the talk. I’m afraid the blog post on setting up a hardware-accelerated DLNA renderer on the Raspberry Pi that I announced during the talk is still not written, sorry about that.
A big thanks to the the cheerful local team, the GNOME.Asia people and of course the sponsors who made all this possible and thanks to the GNOME foundation for sponsoring my attendence.
sponsored-badge-simple

DLNA, client side

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While we were busy fixing the server and rendering side of DLNA with Rygel, the guys at Intel OTC are fixing the Client side of DLNA with something called dLeyna, a nice set of APIs to access and maipulate UPnP-AV and DLNA servers / renderers (such as Rygel, of course), so you can easily add DLNA support to your applications, including the obvious server browsing and render remote control, but also the more non-obvious like media pushing, synchronization, server-side playlists. They already prepared a cool set of demos (for example a Firefox extension to send images from your browser to your TV).
So why is this better than using GUPnP for this? Let me show you some examples.

Controlling a renderer

Not much code to see here, you get the usual suspects of player control functions such as start, stop, etc. as well as methods to query device’s capabilities as there are a lot of optional things on UPnP devices.

Uploading

Well, say you want to upload a file to a server. The code how to do that in GUPnP is  available in gupnp-tools and it’s not exactly pretty. With dLeyna, on the other hand, it’s a fewliner:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import mediaconsole as mc
u = mc.UPNP()
d = u.server_from_udn(sys.argv[1])
d.upload_to_any(sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3])

In DLNA land, this is called “+UP+”.

Playing a file

Or you want to show some media file you got on your device or app on a DLNA-capable TV? Korva is showing how you can do that with plain GUPnP, again with a lots of lines of code. dLeyna providing a nice and clean solution:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
import rendererconosle as rc
m = rc.Manager()
d = m.renderer_from_udn(sys.argv[1])
uri = d.host_file(sys.argv[2])
d.stop()
d.open_uri(uri)
d.play()

And this is called “+PU+” in DLNA land.
Behind the scenes, this is all GUPnP of course. Currently it consists of two DBus services, dleyna-renderer-service and dleyna-server-service, although other IPC mechanisms are on its way. What happens is that that these two services scan the network for available devices and making them available through a set of DBus interfaces, relieving you from the need of searching for devices yourself (and with that providing a device cache, relieving the network from UDP packet bursts), introspecting the devices for supported capabilities and methods and so on.
If you execute the push script from above you get a python wrapper for the com.intel.dLeynaRenderer.Manager DBus interface, which is then locally looking for the DBus path matching the given UPnP UDN and returning a python object implementing the com.intel.dLeynaRenderer.PushHost and com.intel.dLeynaRenderer.RendererDevice interfaces.
Then we temporarily host the file given on the command-line on dLeyna’s internal HTTP server, stopping the currently running playback (Which translates to RenderingControl:Stop SOAP call), send the URI to the server (RenderingControl:SetAVTransportURI) and last but not least start the playback (RenderingControl:Play) which in the end starts the HTTP streaming from dleyna’s internal HTTP server to (Rygel’s) renderer.
And it doesn’t stop at the application level, there’s even integration with HTML5 through cloudeebus and cloud-dLeyna.
As a sidenote: You might ask how that relates to Grilo’s UPnP-AV support or Korva. This is a very valid question. Grilo and Korva are doing very specific tasks while dLeyna aims to be a more complete SDK. It should be quite easy, for example, to port Grilo’s UPnP-AV suppport to dLeyna.

Rygel progress in current master

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It’s been a while since I last blogged about Rygel. Many things have happened since, mainly in features and documentation.

Features

  • Exchangeable media engines: We’ve loosened the dependency on GStreamer a bit. While it is still our first-class transcoding and general media handling library, it is now possible to substitute it with other media processing libraries. A simple example is included in the source.
  • Change tracking. This is a feature introduced in the UPnP content directory specification version 3. It allows clients to, well, track the changes that happen on the server in detail for synchronization purposes. It’s implemented in the framework and as a demonstration in the MediaExport plug-in.
  • GStreamer 1.0 support. As the rest of GNOME, we transitioned to GStreamer 1.0.
  • Playlist support. Rygel now generates playlists for containers on-the-fly and the renderer framework supports automatic playback of them. The only format that’s supported currently is one of the two formats defined by DLNA, DIDL_S, which is just the same format that is used by UPnP AV to describe the media content on a server.
  • Playspeed support. A renderer now can announce that it supports different speeds and directions than normal forward playback.

API

There was another split-up into a renderer framework library and a specific implementation of a renderer using GStreamer which again may be used in your own programs. This is mainly due to the aforementioned change in media backend flexibility.
Otherwise we’re working on making the API easier to use from C and other languages through introspection.

Documentation

There’s been a lot of effort into extending our sparse documentation. It is currently concentrating on the API side of things but will be extended to a higher level as well soon.

Misc

  • There is an example now that implements a DLNA renderer which is running in full-screen
  • There are several examples for the most common init systems to run Rygel as a system service if wanted
  • A load of bugfixes

Rygel split-up

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Following up on Murray’s “Rygel for a DLNA Player” proposal, I’ve made some of the suggested changes listed there which are now in master. These two new libraries have been added

  • librygel-core: This has been a long-standing TODO item. It was necessary to allow in-process use of the DLNA and UPnP knowledge coded in Rygel, allowing the creation of librygel-renderer (see below). On top of this there are other benefits
    • It will allow a Rygel version running on Windows without ugly libtool hacks for the plug-ins.
    • It simplifies the reuse of other parts of Rygel’s code, such as the transcoding HTTP server, in programs like Korva.
  • the new librygel-renderer: In essence this is the playbin plugin with a bit of API on top that simplifies the code necessary to create a renderer. It offers either a playbin element you can use in your code or wraps around an existing playbin.

In future we can extend this family of libraries by “librygel-browse” for remote content access and “librygel-control” for remote control.
To demonstrate librygel-renderer’s capabilities of converting an arbitrary media player based on GStreamer’s GstPlaybin2 into a proper UPnP/DLNA renderer, I have added librygel-renderer support to Totem. You can see the result in the following demo:

The first part of the video (using Sintel) shows how changes in local file playback are being reflected on the UPnP side. In the second part, I set a remote video (Big Buck Bunny) and control totem solely via UPnP, where play, pause, stop, controlling volume, seeking and getting the current playback position is working quite well.
This simple conversion is not a complete DLNA Player. It would need UPnP/DLNA server browsing capabilities for this, as stated in the proposal (In general. Totem can access these servers via its Grilo plug-in).
Of course, with Totem being a complex, mature piece of software, some things don’t work yet:

  • Volume changes in Totem aren’t reflected via UPnP
  • It is not possible to initiate a remote play-back until Totem has an item in its playlist
  • The announced media format support is nowhere near what Totem actually supports

Still, getting an UPnP/DLNA-compatible (and actually close to certifiable) renderer in three lines of code is impressive, don’t you think?
There’s one draw-back that I realized while implementing this. My initial idea to sit on top of a GStreamer playbin2 might be flawed for already existing and mature software such as Totem. There might be much more code-paths dealing with control that happen outside of a playbin. We have an alternative for that as well and that would be implementing one of Rygel’s interfaces by the consuming party. The UPnP and DLNA compatibility that is already in the current code would need to be transferred to this, which is, of course, more work than just attaching to a playbin.
Why should I prefer this above the already available MPRIS Rygel plug-in? There might be several reasons.

  • You don’t want a whole separate Rygel process running just for adding UPnP renderer capabilities to your media player.
  • You aim for some kind of UPnP or DLNA certification – The additional layer of indirection can make that really hard while the presented approach is nearly ready.

So are we going to abandon Rygel’s MPRIS renderer plugin now? No. Because we can’t expect every media player in the world a) use GStreamer and b) want to link against Rygel. MPRIS gives us a quick, ready-made access to a vast amount of players out there and the compatibility it offers is (most of the time) just enough for casual home use.

N9 media pushing

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Ever since the announcement of the N9’s DLNA support people were looking for a feature called DLNA +PU+ which allows you to send media files to e.g. DLNA-capable TVs without enabling content sharing on your device, giving you a really fine-grained control about what and where to share to.
PushUp is a small utility that hooks into the N9’s sharing framework and allows to you push an image or a video to your TV just like you would with Bluetooth or NFC. Get it on this site (or later through the Nokia Store).

It is an offspring of my Korva project, a D-Bus specification and its implementation for media pushing. While still work-in-progress, it’s already fully functional.
Edit: I had to update the package because the icon was missing and cancelling the device selector was broken.
Edit2: Updated again since it was broken on PR < 1.2.