Media in the Home

Now I have moved from student halls to a house, I have begun playing more with media, for instance, I really like the idea of being able to easily play my music in the kitchen. The problem is, all my music is upstairs on my desktop computer, the solution? Mediatomb, Gnome and UPnP.

So what's UPnP, well, I don't really know, but what I have worked out so far, is it works across a network, UPnP devices can find each other automatically, and work out what each other can do.

For this experiment, I was interested in 3 classes of device in UPnP, controlers, media servers, and media renderers. Devices can be more than one class, for instance, lots of devices are media renderers and limited controllers, where the controller can only control the local device.

So, I began by installing mediatomb on my desktop machine. Mediatomb is a media server, it takes content, music pictures or video (and some other stuff), and makes it available over UPnP. Once installed you can configure it with the web interface at http://localhost:49152/ .

Next we need something to render the music that mediatomb makes available, so for this, I used Rygel. You might notice from the wiki page, that Rygel can also be a media server, I haven't tried this functionality as I prefer the daemon nature of mediatomb. So to use Rygel as a media renderer, the playbin plugin must be installed, in Debian this is as easy as installing the rygel-playbin package. Once done, run the rygel command, and if you see this message "Rygel-Message: New plugin 'Playbin' available", it hopefully means its working. I have Rygel currently running on an EeePC in my kitchen, although I am hoping to perhaps replace this with a raspberry pi in the future.

So lets recap, at the moment, my desktop machine is running mediatomb, sharing its content with the network, and my netbook is running Rygel, that can render content with the speakers connected to it. What we need next is a controller, to allow us to actually do something with this. For this we can use one of the gupnp tools, in Debian you need to install the gupnp-tools package. Then start the AV Controler, (gupnp-av-cp from the shell). This allows you to get content from the server, and play it on the renderer.

What I really like about this setup, is that its really extensible. If I can find/write a UPnP controller for my Android phone, I will be able to control the music for my house from my phone. I also found something called rhythmpnp, its a media renderer plugin for Rhythmbox, I haven't managed to run it yet, but I am interested in seeing if it could also be extended to act as a controller?