Ubuntu – DLNA Server/Control Point like Windows Media Player

12.04dlnaupnp

Yes, I know that most questions ending with "like Windows" are odd, but this one really bothers me 😉

If you ever used some DLNA renderer (in my case DLNA-enabled loudspeakers) you probably know the handy "play to"-feature.

From my knowledge of DLNA stuff I would guess, that Windows Media Player is both a DLNA server and control point here, so my question is:

Is there any similar software for Linux accomplishing the same thing with minimal configuration effort? I normally use Banshee for my music library, but it doesn't seem that there is anything available for Banshee…

Best Answer

The control points in Gupnp-tools are very basic, more a testing tool than a every day media player. Try rygel as a DLNA server and eezUPNP as a control point. There is also kinsky by Linn, but I wasn't able to get it to work, keeps crashing. Another alternative may be serviio, but I haven't tried that yet.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Why is Rhythmbox becoming the default (again)

Answer about why Rhythmbox was chosen from the Ubuntu Desktop Mailing list

Based upon broader community feedback, it seems the preference is RB. Now, we have to be careful with that, obviously, but we simply use that as a data point.

Size of both projects on CD. Alone, not a deciding point, but another data point.

Stability in core function. Banshee has many features, though the general impression is that it has stability issues with frequent crashes and hangs needing force quits. RB is known to be quite stable.

User Experience (including usability, overall feel, responsiveness). Banshee has the edge here, though can be less responsive (UI hangs). RB has some UI challenges that were detailed in Charline's usability report.

Speed in start up and operation. This seems mostly a draw. Tweaks can be made to Banshee to improve cold startup time, though it does have moments were it hangs mid operation, but they seem more related to overall stability.

ARM - Big unknown for Banshee.

GTK3 - RB is already GTK3. Banshee is almost there, but carries more risk as it would be new binding stack

Ubuntu – Streaming music to Marantz M-CR603

To my observation the main reason why it seems complicated to achieve media streaming to any external hardware media devices is that the manufacturers of these devices lean back and rely on the presence of OS X or Windows on their customer's machines.

DLNA media file access

From the many solutions that do exist I had success with the following solutions for DLNA media access for my Internet Radio, Android Devices, and Smart TV:

Serviio: closed source, rather sluggish on my machine.
Rygel : default GNOME DLNA streaming server, crashes on access from some devices.
MiniDLNA : very lightweight and stable, needs to be set up from a configuration file.
uPnP : not further developed, does not stream to all of my devices.

My favourite on that list definitely is minidlna, which now runs here 7/24 for several months with no issues. By default minidlna will run on startup as a service. To run it in user space you may use stream2ip from version > 1.0, or the MiniDLNA Application Indicator I made for this. You will still have to set up minidlna by its configuration file first.

Live streams

Sadly none of these solutions are able to stream the output of my soundcard live to the receiver. Newer devices do not support the old RAOP protocol used by pulseaudio but seem to need the newer RAOP2 protocol which is not (yet?) available for Ubuntu.

Live streams to external (non-Ubuntu) devices is possible in case they support the RTP protocol pulseaudio is able to stream with, but I have not found one which does.

Another possibility is setting up an Iceast Internet Radio Server to generate our own private radio "station" in our local network. This works great but a prererequisite is that the tuner is able to connect to a stream defined by its IP-adress, and port. It should be an easy thing to do, but sadly most devices do not offer this. Instead they support Internet Radio directory services (e.g. vTuner, or tunein) which may dependent on the device not support custom radio streams to be added. From me only my radio device which operates through Reciva has no issues playing custom streams generated from Icecast (both via stream2ip, or from command line).

Marantz

Last time I contacted Marantz (August 2012) they gave me the following information regarding support for a custom radio station:

"It is not possible to enter a custom radio station to your favorites. You can only select a station from the list provided by vTuner. From there you will have a choice of more than 17.000 stations." ^{Translated from German}

We may try if adding a custom URL in a personalized instance of a radio station service (see this blog for Denon) will work by now. For Marantz we can access the vTuner service on http://radiomarantz.com/. To personalize the service we need to register with the device's unique access code (likely to be the MAC). We then may be able to add the local URL of our Icecast radio stream (<IP>:<Port>/stream.mp3) as a custom radio station. Unfortunately due to lack of hardware we can't test this here.