Free DLNA serv­er which works good with my Sony BRAVIA TV

In sev­er­al pre­vi­ous posts I wrote about my quest for the right source for­mat to stream video to my Sony BRAVIA TV (build in 2009). The last week-end I final­ly found some­thing which sat­is­fies me.

What I found was servi­io, a free UPnP-AV (DLNA) serv­er. It is writ­ten in java and runs on Win­dows, Lin­ux and FreeB­SD (it is not list­ed on the web­site, but we have an not-so-up-to-date ver­sion in the ports tree). If nec­es­sary it transcodes the input to an appro­pri­ate for­mat for the DLNA ren­der­er (in my case the TV).

I test­ed it with my slow Net­book, so that I was able to see with which input for­mat it will just remux the input con­tain­er to a MPEG trans­port stream, and which input for­mat would be real­ly re-encoded to a for­mat the TV understands.

The bot­tom line of the tests is, that I just need to use a sup­port­ed con­tain­er (like MKV or MP4 or AVI) with H.264-encoded video (e.g. encod­ed by x264) and AC3 audio.

The TV is able to chose between sev­er­al audio streams, but I have not test­ed if servi­io is able to serve files with mul­ti­ple audio streams (my wife has a dif­fer­ent moth­er lan­guage than me, so it is inter­est­ing for us to have mul­ti­ple audio streams for a movie), and I do not know if DLNA sup­ports some­thing like this.

Now I just have to replace minidl­na (which only works good with my TV for MP3s and Pic­tures) with servi­io on my FreeB­SD file serv­er and we can for­get about the disk-juggling.

Lin­ux­u­la­tor D‑Trace probes com­mit­ted to current

A while ago I com­mit­ted the lin­ux­u­la­tor D‑Trace probes I talked about ear­li­er. I wait­ed a lit­tle bit for this announce­ment to make sure I have not bro­ken any­thing. Nobody com­plained so far, so I assume noth­ing obvi­ous­ly bad crept in.

The >500 probes I com­mit­ted do not cov­er the entire lin­ux­u­la­tor, but are a good start. Adding new ones is straight for­ward, if some­one is inter­est­ed in a junior-kernel-hacker task, this would be one. Just ask me (or ask on emulation@), and I can guide you through it.

linux_base-c6

Seems I for­got to announce that the linux_base-c6 is in the Ports Col­lec­tion now. Well, it is not a replace­ment for the cur­rent default lin­ux base, the lin­ux­u­la­tor infra­struc­ture ports are miss­ing and we need to check if the ker­nel sup­ports enough of 2.6.18 that noth­ing breaks.

TODO:

  • check for updat­ed RPMs for linux_base-c6
  • cre­ate lin­ux­u­la­tor infra­struc­ture ports
  • improve the ker­nel to sup­port more of lin­ux 2.6.18

To my knowl­edge, nobody is work­ing on any­thing of this. Any­one is wel­come to have a look and pro­vide patches.