Monthly Archives: August 2010

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.

State of the GUPnP stack on Windows and other scary tales

I updated the windows ports of gssdp and gupnp today, did some further clean-up on the gupnp port and filed merge-requests for both on gitorious.
I also deleted the gupnp-win32 repository on github. New development will go to this repository on gitorious. There is still the gssdp-win32 repository on github since I have not yet taken care of the MSVC additions.
I also started wrapping gssdp et al into *mm (hey, I work for Openismus now 😉 but this has proven to be somewhat difficult.

Trekstor Vibez and Jaunty^WLucid

So – A year has passed, two Ubuntu versions, what’s the state of MTP vs. mass storage? Apparently still broken. Same same but different.
Instead of making the player crash, gphoto2/libmtp and usb mass storage fight for the right to access the device which leads to very ugly errors in dmesg that look like the device or at least its file-system is severely broken 🙁
So, once again: Either make the device MTP only or remove the device’s entry from the libmtp udev rules which now reside in /lib/udev/rules.d/45-libmtp8.rules