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.

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.

In case you have not noticed yet, KDTRACE_HOOKS is now in the GENERIC ker­nel in FreeBSD-cur­rent. This means you just need to load the DTrace mod­ules and can use DTrace with the GENERIC ker­nel.

In case you do not know what you can do with DTrace, take the time to have a look at the DTrace blog. It is worth any minute you invest read­ing it.

This week­end I made some progress in the lin­ux­u­la­tor:

• I MFCed the report­ing of some linux-syscalls to 9-stable and 8-stable.
• I updated my lin­ux­u­la­tor-dtrace patch to a recent -cur­rent. I already com­piled it on i386 and arundel@ has it com­piled on amd64. I counted more than 500 new DTrace probes. Now that DTrace res­cans for SDT probes when a ker­nel mod­ule is loaded, there is no ker­nel panic any­more when the linux mod­ule is loaded after the DTrace mod­ules and you want to use DTrace. I try to com­mit this at a morn­ing of a day where I can fix things dur­ing the day in case some prob­lems show up which I did not notice dur­ing my testing.
• I cre­ated a PR for portmgr@ to repocopy a new linux_base port.
• I set the expi­ra­tion date of linux_base-fc4 (only used by 7.x and upstream way past its EoL) and all depen­dent ports. It is set to the EoL of the last 7.x release, which can not use a later linux_base port. I also added a com­ment which explains that the date is the EoL of the last 7.x release.

I just updated to a recent -cur­rent and tried the new nullfs. Sock­ets (e.g. the MySQL one) work now with nullfs. No need to have e.g. jails on the same FS and hardlink the socket to not need to use TCP in MySQL (or an IP at all for the jail).

Great work!