Monthly Archives: March 2016

Rygel updates

This is going to be a bit longer than usual. I’m going to present some of the changed that have gone into Rygel since the last post (Wow, over a year ago…, sorry about that)

Inner changes

After 0.24, Rygel has received a new internal resource handling that basically decouples the UPnP item from a file so that – in theory – an UPnP item can have multiple on-disk resources.
Unfortunately, this code was contributed as a big lump of code; I tried to split it up and make it more manageable, but the result was that the 0.26 series of Rygel has had several regressions, sorry about that. The 0.28.3 stable release should be as good as the 0.24 release.

New features

Access control

Rygel has gained support for a simple access control mechanism. It’s rather simple and checks whether access to an URI is allowed by a remote peer using DBus.
Unfortunately there is no “policy engine” yet. So from a user perspective, there is currently no difference. Implementing this is on the agenda for 0.32.

More robust

MediaExport’s meta-data extraction was made more robust by moving the extraction into its own process. Files that cause the extraction process to crash will be black-listed and never touched again. There is a new tool in the GIT that lets you investigate the database, the black-list and remove uris from that blacklist.

DVD support

With the upcoming stable release 0.30, Rygel’s MediaExport plugin will gain support for exposing DVD images, either as ISO files or as VIDEO_TS folders. Expect some rough edges; for example, many clients will not be able to seek in the video files as it requires some non-mandatory DLNA seeking features for now. Also DVDs with many titles are not really nice to navigate.

LightMediaScanner support

Rygel has gained support for exposing the contents of LightMediaScanner’s media index.

Request for support

The UPnP forum has been merged with the OCF. Unfortunately, this means that there is no longer a free membership available with access to the certification tools. There is a new non-profit membership which even allows for certification, but it costs $1000. While I’m willing to pay a large chunk of that myself, it would be awesome if some people would join me in making this happen for Rygel and GUPnP sooner. It would allow me to get them more compliant, tested (e.g. for IPv6 support) and maybe even UPnP certified. I would like to setup some crowd funding thing for that, but I have no clue which platform I should use. Is there any site that doesn’t upset RMS?
That’s all for now.