Serviio

Imagine my surprise when the latest control point software ("Upnp AV Control Point" on Ubuntu based Debian systems), to be specific works really well with Serviio. And actually works as a network remote on our Samsung 5000 C series led tv.

I can fast forward with the slider, control the TV volume, stop, pause and not even have to launch the allshare interface first or even use the Samsung remote. Essentially the dlna client on the samsung controls the TV and alows the upnp server control as a remote control.

The TV will warn you that someone is trying to access and play stuff and you have to use the remote control to accept the external connection or the TV will reject server requests from the Upnp Control Point. I did reject it at first then reset the TV to accept remote requests to send data. And presto I can control the volume and the built in dlna media player controls with my laptop. It scared the livin' daylights out of me when all of a sudden my mouse would send the volume on the TV and thereby my audio system through the roof by simply side scrolling my IBM touch pad!

The way it works is simple you simply see the local files that have been made available by Serviio console and send them directly to the TV and bingo the TV launches the built in allshare dlna media player. The linux software is really simple and detects both the local server (Serviio) and client dlna recievers. When the file completes it goes back to your regular input so you do not have to switch anything it is all automatic. Beats the heck out of anything out there for doing a media presentation on the TV! This setup makes Power Point look like a media toy! I can convert files to jpegs and slide show them and intersperse mpegs and mp3. So all and all it kicks anything I have used with Windows for this TV right in the butt.

The killer is that it turns out that it is fairly fast and even the lag times are not too bad. Seconds at most.

My setup as you can see is wifi from my laptop to a router and then by cat 5 to the TV! And it plays mpeg2 with dolby 5.1 without serious problems! The AV control Point also has the ability to clear the request state of the TV which is a God send as the media renderer has a tendency to hang sometimes...however if you play with the TV settings things can be fixed.

Here is a screen shot of it in action

This is fantastic I hope that Serviio becomes the standard for upnp!
Keep up the great work Zip

cool stuff

Nice maybe something thats need a topic writing about in in the third party forums?

I'm running Linux Mint 10 and man it's been a long task to compile gupnp. been at it for hours. Anything specific to what packages you are using?

sudo apt-get install gupnp-tools

should do the trick that way all the deps will be covered.

I do not know which repo it is in but it is part of mediabuntu so it should show up if you have the non-free codec repos up.
I have not tried it from source but I know it will require all of the associated libs like libupnp3-dev so it will require quite a few to get going. It is a gnome app so libgtk2-dev which is part of build-essential is a must. PM me if you have trouble. It is a shame that it is not included in the distros cause it is beyond a doubt the best software I have seen for controlling, debugging a network and serving up upnp on Linux. Yes the command line can do most of what the components do but then again the documentation you would have to wade through would take for ever to uncover! In the past I have used scripts but they have their limitations and tracing upnp network traffic is a pita at the best of times.

Eric