inconsequentia

Stream­ing con­tent from a UPnP server (in my case, the XBMC media centre in my lounge room) to an Ubuntu machine is fairly simple. But there didn’t seem to be any doc­u­ment­a­tion that I could find, and I ended up spend­ing a sur­pris­ing amount of time futz­ing around mak­ing it work. This is how I did it in Ubuntu 13.04. I use GNOME for my desktop, but con­firmed that it also works just fine with the default Unity desktop. Other envir­on­ments may need to tweak how the ser­vice starts, as well as clients.

Install soft­ware

We’re using the Rygel UPnP pack­age, spe­cific­ally its MPRIS inter­face to enable UPnP ren­der­ing to desktop media play­ers. In addi­tion, we install GUPnP to provide a UPnP Con­trol Point, and finally ban­shee. I had a crack at using Totem as a ren­derer, as of April 2013 the ver­sion in Ubuntu registered as a Medi­aR­en­derer but quietly refused to play any con­tent I asked it to. The upnp-inspector pack­age is nice for check­ing everything works.
sudo aptitude install rygel rygel-preferences gupnp-tools banshee upnp-inspector

Con­fig­ure rygel

Open Rygel’s con­fig­ur­a­tion file:
nano ~/.config/rygel.conf
And enable the MPRIS inter­face by adding the fol­low­ing at end of the file:
[MPRIS]
enabled=true

Rygel is designed as a UPnP media server, and by default will start offer­ing up local video, music and pic­ture shares as media serv­ers. If you don’t want this, it can be dis­abled by run­ning the Rygel Pref­er­ences GUI tool, or by adding this to the [gen­eral] sec­tion of your rygel.conf:
interface=
upnp-enabled=false

Auto­start Rygel at login

cp /usr/share/applications/rygel.desktop ~/.config/autostart
Log out and back in to start the Rygel service.

Con­fig­ure Banshee

Finally, the MPRIS inter­face needs to be enabled in Ban­shee. Start it up, nav­ig­ate to Edit -> Pref­er­ences. Click the Exten­sions tab, scroll down to the util­it­ies sec­tion, and ensure the MPRIS D-Bus Inter­face is enabled.

Play­ing things

Inspector win­dow show­ing my XBMC server, the local Rygel share, ban­shee, and BubbleUPnP on my android phone.

Start UPnP Inspector. It should list any avail­able Medi­aServ­ers on your net­work and, if you didn’t dis­able them, local shares from Rygel. Start ban­shee, and it should also appear as a Medi­aR­en­derer in the inspector window.

Any UPnP con­trol point on the net­work will be able to send con­tent to ban­shee (I’m fond of BubbleUPnP on Android). Or start the UPnP AV Remote con­trol pro­gram. I’ve only been play­ing with it for an hour or two, but get best res­ults from external con­trol point soft­ware. The GUPnP remote occa­sion­ally stalls try­ing to play things.

The path to my front door is long and very poorly lit. There’s a sensor light moun­ted above it, but that’s never worked and, liv­ing in a rental, get­ting it fixed has been a bit of a task. So I bought a roll of 3-wire LED rope light on eBay. Cable-tied it to the under­side of the bot­tom stretcher of the fence run­ning along­side the path. The power cable was fed in through a win­dow by the front door, and I had nice, bright, even illu­min­a­tion. But it was still kind of bor­ing. So I bought an ethernet-capable ardu­ino. (Con­tin­ued)

Yes­ter­day I bricked my phone.

I bought a HTC Dream on an Optus plan the day they released it in Aus­tralia. Out of the box it was awe­some, pretty much everything I wanted out of a smart­phone. But as time passed, the Cup­cake android release became wide­spread, and Optus lol­ly­gagged about push­ing the update out to their users. One by one my favour­ite applic­a­tions released updates that made them incom­pat­ible with my phone, until even­tu­ally I gave up and found a good guide on root­ing G1s.

With an up-to-date firm­ware and Mar­ket Ena­bler to get around Optus’ other major prob­lem of not mak­ing paid applic­a­tions avail­able, I was in smart­phone heaven. That was until I heard wind of ROMs based on the Android 2.1 release (as seen on the new Nexus One hand­set) run­ning on the G1. It looked like it might be fun to try, so off I went.

One of the steps involved in ini­tially root­ing a hand­set involves load­ing a new SPL to bypass region check­ing and enable boot­ing unsigned ROMs, so I’d done it a couple of times before and was fairly com­fort­able with it. Unfor­tu­nately, newer builds need the Haykuro SPL, which is sup­posed to be more aggress­ive with how it deals with the internal stor­age space (lead­ing to more size for big­ger images), but also kind of dan­ger­ous. I double– and triple-checked everything, but still seem to have screwed some­thing up flash­ing the SPL, and now I have a phone that is basic­ally dead. The 1^st boot­loader screen comes up, but I can’t get in to the fast­boot menu or the recov­ery image. My poor little momo (my com­puters are named after Samurai Champloo char­ac­ters) was no more.

Luck­ily my birth­day was yes­ter­day, so I don’t feel too bad about treat­ing myself to a new phone. After a morn­ing of read­ing reviews, I think I’ve decided on a Motorola Mile­stone. I’m a little wary of Motorola — my last Moto hand­set was an abso­lute dis­aster, and work­ing for a mobile com­mu­nic­a­tions com­pany means I’ve had a chance to tinker with newer Motorola hand­sets that were sim­il­arly dis­ap­point­ing. But the Mile­stone seems to be a very impress­ive and solidly-built phone. The jury is still out on whether the Mile­stone or the new Nexus One would win for Best Android Phone right now, but I for one am swayed by a good hard­ware keyboard.

So, momo is dead, long live… uh… momo?

My net­work gets its addresses from dns­masq run­ning on the Kami­kaze 8.09 release of Open­WRT. This oper­at­ing sys­tem uses an unusual sys­tem for con­fig­ur­a­tion, and get­ting dns­masq set up for net­work boot­ing took a little bit of effort. So I’m doc­u­ment­ing it here, for either any­body else who’s stuck on it, or for when I inev­it­ably forget.

Edit /etc/config/dhcp, and in the config dnsmasq sec­tion add a line like this. The format is as per the dns­masq man page:

    option dhcp_boot	pxelinux.0,tftp_server_hostname,tftp_server_ipaddr

The init script does all the pars­ing of the dhcp con­fig file, con­vert­ing things in there to cmdline argu­ments to dns­masq. So you need to edit /etc/init.d/dnsmasq, and in the dnsmasq() func­tion add this line:

	append_parm "$cfg" "dhcp_boot" "--dhcp-boot"

The func­tion already has a bunch of append_parm lines. Just search for those and add your new line imme­di­ately under them.

Restart dns­masq and you’re good to go.

Well, that was fun.

peter@fuu:~$ date +%s
1234567890

Appar­ently the next big event is 0×50000000 seconds since epoch, due to hap­pen shortly after 9pm on the 13^th of July, 2012.