Rygel upnp services

[dZeus]

Just wanted to bring some attention to a neat program I ran into:

Rygel

It's an application that implements various uPNP services. I've used it for
- uPNP MediaServer (to stream video/music to uPNP MediaRenderers like foobar2000 on Windows)
- uPNP MediaRenderer

While written for Gnome, you can also launch it as a command line application without requiring Gnome/X11; I'm successfully using it on a Linksys NSLU2 (266MHz 32MB ARMv5 machine) with an external USB audio hooked up to play back music over the network to my HiFi setup.

The version in Debian Wheezy (0.12.6) doesn't support Windows Media Player properly yet, but the latest unstable release from their website (0.13.3) supposedly does (haven't tested it). For media playback it depends on the Gstreamer framework, so it basically can play back most available formats.

[UtwigMU]

Looks promising. Where do you keep media files to stream from?

[dZeus]

My media files are on a faster NAS (1.2GHz Marvell Kirkwood ARM cpu).

The NSLU2 as uPNP MediaRenderer will go to my brother who will stream audio from a laptop and films from local external USB HDD to a uPNP-capable Samsung LCD TV.

I've noticed that it's really difficult to find optimized decoders that will work on the 266MHz ARM box in realtime and fit in the gstreamer multimedia framework that Rygel uses. Vorbis and MP3 are possible. AAC and WMA is a problem right now. There's a project for portable music players (Rockbox) that have highly optimized decoders, but they don't port over easily into gstreamer. Too bad that the rockbox devs are not pushing their changes upstream to let more people benefit.

P.S. I'm using minidlna in linux as uPNP MediaServer for the NSLU2 as it uses less memory than the Rygel MediaServer.