Monthly Archives: January 2012

Lately, in Rygel land…

In General

I know I have been quite silent about Rygel in general lately because I was quite busy with my day job. Since Zeeshan left Nokia after the MeeGo turmoil I took over his task of bringing Rygel in good shape to form the basis for Harmattan’s DLNA functionality.

These efforts, started long ago by Zeeshan, are finally coming to a close and entering the wild. With the release of PR1.2 beta for the N950, the alert reader might have spotted the release note entry “Media sharing with DLNA compatible devices”. You can probably guess what that’s powered by 😉

One of the goals that we’d set ourselves has already been reached. The device is UPnP certified. The DLNA compatibility is in really good shape as well.

That is one of the reasons why the upstream Rygel development looks kind of stalled. The other one is that we’ve been focusing on ironing out the rough edges with emphasis on stability. Naturally, all of the patches that resulted here have been upstreamed, either to Rygel, GUPnP or libsoup.

On the device

So what’s on the device? A more or less pristine upstream snapshot taken several commits after 0.11.3 with later patches cherry-picked and some minor adjustments to adapt ourselves to the environment, like different device details and icons.

What can it do?

It implements a M-DMS, a mobile media server, enabling you to share the media content of your phone in your home network.
In addition to the rather useless mandatory media formats defined by DLNA we have decided to include a LPCM transcoder and the necessary profiles to share all the videos and images you’re going to take or already have taken on the device.
The server runs in a strict sharing mode where only media files that conform to one of the supported DLNA profiles are shared. This is configurable and we plan to release a “tweaking app” later to help the average end user to fine-tune and undo some of the limitations that had to be done due to the DLNA guidelines.
So, to all that already can, enjoy Rygel on your mobile phone.

Slides from DLNA talk

Last week I did a talk about DLNA, what it is and how it relates to UPnP during a DeveloperGarden event hosted in Berlin’s famous hacker space c-base.
Here are the german slides and a link to the video. I’m told that the slides are quite readable through Google Translate if you ignore the occasional denglish.
Note: Both talk and slides are in German. I will also be giving a short talk about Rygel on this year’s FOSDEM in Brussels.