14 DAY TRIAL // Rygel, a home media solution (UPnP AV MediaServer) that allows users to easily share audio, video, and pictures to other devices, is now at version 0.23.1.
With Rygel, users will be able to browse the media collection from the TV or PS3 on a PC running GNOME, and they will have the possibility to play any of said media.
This is a very interesting application because it does something that very few others manage to do on the Linux platform. A few years ago, Rygel wasn't really being used at its full potential because there weren't too many devices, like Smart TVs for example, that would require users to have a working media server.
The prices for Smart TVs have dropped dramatically in the last couple of years and more Linux users are now looking for a media server solution. Unfortunately, there are few media servers out there and some of them even charge a price for the premium features.
“There are many DLNA/UPnP devices on the market, such as the Sony Playstation 3, smartphones, Microsoft XBox 360, DLNA speakers, and TVs from Sony and Samsung, with more expected.”
“Rygel allows a user to browse and play media stored on a PC via a TV or PS3, even if the original content is in a format that the TV or PS3 cannot play, easily search and play media using a phone, TV, or PC, and redirect sound output to DLNA speakers,” reads the official website.
According to the changelog, several critical bugs related to time-out sources have been fixed, the media server is no longer replacing running instance by default, a new “-r/--replace” option has been added to go back to the old behavior, a few manpage fixes have been implemented, the error handling in the reference creation has been improved, the media art lookup has been ported to libmediaart, some documentation for AudioItem has been added, a potential null pointer dereference has been fixed, the playlist timeout has been removed, and the renderer now exits properly if there is no playbin element.
Also, renderer.wrap has been deprecated, the dlna+http virtual protocol is now used if the dlnasrc element is available, Gtk.Window is now used instead of Gtk.Dialog, libmediaart is now used for media art extraction, and the API and ABI versions have been bumped to 2.4.
Check out the official changelog for a complete list of updates and new features. You can download Rygel 0.21.3 right now from Softpedia, but this is just the source package. If you want to use this application right now you will have to use the local repositories or you can use this PPA (for Ubuntu).
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.