Saturday, October 13, 2012

Ubuntu DLNA and Samsung Smart TV

A few months ago we got one of those new Samsung 5300 Series Smart TVs. I decided to set up a DLNA server so I could replace my MythTV box. I found that with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, miniDLNA worked out of the box. But it didn't have the best format support so I switched to Rygel.

But if you just apt-get install rygel, you will get version 0.14.0, which doesn't work. I found that I needed at least 0.15.3 to get the TV seeing Ubuntu. I also found that you can even build 0.17.0 without mucking with your rootfs.

Here is a link to rygel-0.17.0.tar.xz. Extract with tar Jxvf xxx.tar.xz

And here are some deps I needed to install before I could build rygel from source.

sudo apt-get install libgssdp-1.0-dev libgupnp-1.0-dev libgupnp-av-1.0-dev libgupnp-dlna-1.0-dev libgee-dev uuid-dev libsqlite3-dev intltool tracker-sparql-0.14-dev

You will also need to make sure that this line is uncommented in your rygel.conf file to make the Samsung TV see your Rygel server.

force-downgrade-for=Allegro-Software-WebClient;SEC_HHP;SEC HHP;Mediabolic-IMHTTP/1;TwoPlayer;Reciva

I left the network interface line blank, but I set the port to 8200 (same as miniDLNA).