Media sharing with Rygel and Gstreamer

People are acquiring, viewing, and managing an increasing amount of digital media on their devices (music, video, photos). Also increasing is the frustration of having media spread around the devices and not having the specific song/video desired available in that machine. Shouldn't we be able to enjoy the content in any device, regardless of where it is stored?

DLNA, the Digital Living Network Alliance has a digital home vision that integrates televisions, computers, mobiles, printers and all other devices in a network with seamless media availability. This alliance, which includes major electronic device manufacturers, has created a specification of how media has to be presented and shared.

Rygel is the solution to the need MeeGo has to support DLNA. Living in gnome.org, Rygel is a service running in the background of your MeeGo environment as a DLNA/UPnP media server that tracks and shares your available media. This media can be streamed to any device's media renderer that supports DLNA, like for example another MeeGo device, the PS3, XBox, Samsung TV, DLNA speakers or Rhythmbox. If the device doesn't support the format the content is in, Rygel will negotiate with it and transcode the media seamlessly on-the-fly into a format it supports.

Rygel uses GStreamer, the open source multimedia framework, to support playing, streaming, and transcoding media. Handling all the formats and profiles specified by DLNA. The GStreamer multimedia framework is at the heart of all things multimedia on MeeGo and many other platforms, and enables creating all the spectrum of multimedia applications whether trivial or very complex. Its killer feature is flexibility, which Rygel clearly benefits from.

During this talk Luis will show how to use Rygel: using your MeeGo device to share all your media, play any media on some other device, or use it to remotely control other devices. Plus get into the technical details of how Rygel works with GStreamer to do this: the problems encountered, the pipelines created, the switch to GStreamer's new encodebin, the need for very specific profiles.