MediaServer with Rygel

Like a lot of  people, I have one of those set-top TV boxes that can record TV shows at set times.  I made sure that I could get at the files (using a FTP server in this case) and that the files were some sort of common standard (MPEG 4 TS).  I also have a bunch of mp3 music files.

That’s fine when I’m on the desktop because the files are local.  I wanted to make these available to anyone in the household. DLNA seemed to be a reasonably OK way of doing this, the problem was, how to get it working in Linux?

A lot of the problem is that it is hard to find a DLNA only server.  Sure MythTV could do it, but it needs a tv tuner or a lot of fiddling around.  XMBC can also do it, but it needs to be running a GUI.  I even tried mediatomb but could not get the thing to compile as the library calls to mozjs were all using deprecated functions. I just wanted a daemon that served stuff, nothing more; no fancy ui, no need for X just file serving goodness.

Rygel is almost that.  You could say it is a user server much like a torrent client/server.  The nice thing is you can fiddle around with rygel so it becomes close to a real server.  This is how I did it.

First, I made a rygel user with a home directory, but disabled login. I don’t like programs running root if they don’t need it and rygel doesn’t need it.  The home directory needs to be writeable to the rygel user too otherwise the program doesn’t work too well. I use /var/local/rygel as its home.

For the configuration, copy /etc/rygel.conf to ~rygel/.config/rygel.conf  This is the configuration file for rygel. I disabled all of the modules except MediaExport. Make sure you disable Tracker otherwise MediaExport will not work. Tracker is only useful for real users who are logged in and have dbus etc going which this user is certainly not.

I made a simple rygeld file in /usr/local/sbin which basically starts the program, forks and grabs the PID to write to a pidfile. This mean it was easier to track the program in the init scripts.

#!/bin/sh
#
# Rygel daemon handling
RYGEL='/usr/bin/rygel'
RYGEL_ARGS=''
su -s /bin/sh -c "nohup $RYGEL $RYGEL_ARGS > /var/local/rygel/rygel.log 2>&1 &"
rygel
EXIT_CODE=$?
if [ $EXIT_CODE != 0 ] ; then
        return $EXIT_CODE
fi
PGROUP=`ps --no-headers -o pgrp $$`
PID=`pgrep -g $PGROUP -f $RYGEL`
echo $PID > /var/run/rygel.pid
exit 0

In case you were wondering, the pgrp finds the program group so the pgrep finds the right rygel process that has the same program group as the starting shell.

The init script is a standard init script except the –exec flag checks for /usr/bin/rygel but the start line starts /usr/local/sbin/rygeld  This is because we want to kill the real rygel process but start it with the script.

This setup works rather well. You do get some messages in the logfile about dbus not working but it is harmless. I tried disabling the mpris and external plugins but no matter what flag or configuration file option I tried, they would always try to start and fail with no dbus.

Rygel is a a reasonably light-weight way of serving media to your home network. It idles 200 MB virtual with 16MB resident and when idle uses almost no CPU.

Related articles

• Verizon planning Media Server for FiOS TV (techradar.com)
• Infographic: The Changing TV Landscape (readwriteweb.com)
• Evan Shapiro: TV: The Great Uniter? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Ubuntu Expands To TV, A Video Shows A Gorgeous Ubuntu TV Prototype In Action (essayboard.com)