Monthly Archives: June 2009

More Rygel testing

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel’s tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API.  It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker.

The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the “org.freedesktop.Tracker” bus name so that if the user has not chosen to run the service (or has killed it), it won’t be automatically activated.  Unfortunately, instead of just calling a Tracker D-Bus method, Rygel was trying to manually activate Tracker via a StartServiceByName() call.  This would fail even if Tracker was running, hence my assumption that it was a tracker API version problem.

This problem will be fixed in the next Rygel release: it will call a method on Tracker directly to see if it is available.  With that problem out of the way, I was able to try out the backend.  It was providing a lot more metadata to the PS3 so more files were playable, which was good.  Browsing folders was also much quicker than the folder back end.  There were a few problems though:

  1. Files are exposed in one of three folders: “All Images”, “All Music” or “All Videos”.  With even a moderate sized music collection, this is unmangeable.  It wasn’t clear what order the files were being displayed in either.
  2. There was quite a long delay before video playback starts.

When the folder back end fixes the metadata and speed issues, I’d be inclined to use it over the tracker back end.

Video Transcoding

Getting video transcoding working turned out to require a newer GStreamer (0.10.23), the “unstripped” ffmpeg libraries and the “bad” GStreamer plugins package from multiverse.  With those installed, things worked pretty well.  With these dependencies encoded in the packaging, it’d be pretty painless to get it set up.  Certainly much easier than setting things up in MediaTomb’s configuration file.

Ubuntu packages for Rygel

I promised Zeeshan that I’d have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so.  For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I’ve put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here:

Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.  It is the first Debian package I’ve put together from scratch and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be.  The tips from the “Teach me packaging” workshop at the Canonical All Hands meeting last month were quite helpful.

After installing the package, you can configure it by running the “rygel-preferences” program.  The first notebook page lets you configure the transcoding support, and the second page lets you configure the various media source plugins.

I wasn’t able to get the Tracker plugin working on my system, which I think is due to Rygel expecting the older Tracker D-Bus API.  I was able to get the folder plugin working pretty easily though.

Once things were configured, I ran Rygel itself and an extra icon showed up on my PlayStation 3.  Getting folder listings was quite slow, but apparently this is limited to the folder back end and is currently being worked on.  It’s a shame I wasn’t able to test the more mature Tracker back end.

With LPCM transcoding enabled, I was able to successfully play a Vorbis file on the PS3.  With transcoding disabled, I wasn’t able to play any music — even files in formats the PS3 could handle natively.  This was apparently due to the folder backend not providing the necessary metadata.  I didn’t have any luck with MPEG2 transcoding for video.

It looks like Rygel has promise, but is not yet at a stage where it could replace something like MediaTomb.  The external D-Bus media source support looks particularly interesting.  I look forward to trying out version 0.4 when it is released.