How to install the TwonkyMedia UPnP server on Solaris

TwonkyVision running in an lx branded Zone on Solaris, streaming music to a PS3.

In my last post, I compiled an installed the MediaTomb UPnP server on Solaris in order to stream movies, photos and music to my PS3 and it worked well. But I wasn't quite satisfied with it's features: No support for tags/covers in AAC encoded music (>95% of my music library is encoded in the superior AAC format) and a few other quirks here and there. So I decided to try the TwonkyVision TwonkyMedia server.

Unfortunately, the guys at TwonkyMedia (now PacketVideo) don't support their TwonkyVision server on Solaris (yet?). Only Linux, Windows and MacOS X are supported. The absence of answers to a Solaris request post in their forum isn't very encouraging. TwonkyMedia is closed source and only commercially available (EUR 29.95) which means you can't even compile it yourself on Solaris. At least there's a trial period of 30 days. Does this mean no ZFS and other Solaris goodness to TwonkyMedia?

Fear not, this is exactly what Branded Zones in Solaris 10/OpenSolaris are all about! They allow you to install a Linux distribution inside a Solaris 10 Container. The BrandZ framework then seamlessly translates Linux systemcalls into Solaris systemcalls. The result: All the goodness of Solaris, such as ZFS, FMA, DTrace and whatnot, even for closed source or otherwise problematic Linux applications. So, here's how to run the TwonkyMedia server on a Solaris x64/x86 machine (sorry, no SPARC, different CPU architecture):

Set up a standard lx branded Zone. Here's a short and sweet tutorial on how to do it. In my case, I used ZFS for the zone root path. This gives me compression and the ability to snapshot the Linux root filesystem whenever I like.
I used the CentOS tarball from the BrandZ download area to install a standard CentOS zone. Quick, easy, free, works well for most cases.
After having installed the CentOS Linux branded Zone and before the first boot, it is a good idea to make a ZFS snapshot of the root filesystem, just in case. You can later use the snapshot to revert the zone to it's freshly installed state or to easily clone more zones like this in the future.
After the first boot of the Linux zone with zoneadm -z zonename boot, you can login to it's virtual console using zlogin -z zonename. Now, setup basic networking from inside the Linux zone by editing the /etc/sysconfig/network file. Then, you can login through ssh -X into the Linux zone and run graphical configuration tools such as redhat-config-network to configure DNS, set up users, etc.
Now, download the TwonkyMedia server from the Linux zone by using wget http://www.twonkyvision.com/Download/4.4/twonkymedia-i386-glibc-2.2.5.zip and follow the TwonkyMedia installation guide.
You should now have the TwonkyMedia server up and running from within a Linux branded zone on Solaris! Connect to it through your webbrowser at http://your.servers.ip.address/:9000 and configure it's various settings to your taste.

This is it, actually it's much easier than compiling MediaTomb, but it comes at the cost of having to pay after the trial period, if you like it. Above, you see a picture of TwonkyMedia, running in an lx branded zone on Solaris, streaming AAC music from my favorite Chilean band "La Ley" to a PS3. Notice the cover art and song info to the bottom left that is not available with MediaTomb today for AAC encoded music.

I'm now going to write to the TwonkyVision support department at support@twonkyvision.de and ask for a real Solaris version. After all, if they expect their customers to pay for software, they ahould at least provide a real binary. If you're interested in getting TwonkyMedia to run natively on Solaris too, join me and send emails of your own to them or post to their forums.

"How to install the TwonkyMedia UPnP server on Solaris" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-03-30 11:44:58.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
brandz container dlna linux opensolaris ps3 solaris streaming twonky twonkymedia twonkyvision upnp zones
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
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Thursday March 20, 2008

How to compile/run MediaTomb on Solaris for PS3 and other streaming clients

MediaTomb showing photos on a PS3 Before visiting CeBIT, I went to see my friend Ingo who works at the Clausthal University's computing center (where I grew up, IT-wise). This is a nice pre-CeBIT tradition we keep over the years when we get to watch movies in Ingo's home cinema and play computer games all day for a weekend or so :).

To my surprise, Ingo got himself a new PlayStation 3 (40GB). The new version is a lot cheaper (EUR 370 or so), less noisy (new chip process, no PS2 compatibility), and since HD-DVD is now officially dead, it's arguably the best value for money in Blu-Ray players right now (regular firmware upgrades, good picture quality, digital audio and enough horsepower for smooth Java BD content). All very rational and objective arguments to justify buying a new game console :).

The PS3 is not just a Blu-Ray player, it is also a game console (I recommend "Ratchett&Clank: Tools of Destruction" and the immensely cute "LocoRoco: Cocoreccho!", which is a steal at only EUR 3) and can act as a media renderer for DLNA compliant media servers: Watch videos, photos and listen to music in HD on the PS 3 from your home server.

After checking out a number of DLNA server software packages, it seemed to me that MediaTomb is the most advanced open source one (TwonkyVision seems to be nicer, but sorry, it isn't open source...). So here is a step-by-step guide on how to compile and run it in a Solaris machine.

Basic assumptions

This guide assumes that you're using a recent version of Solaris. This should be at least Solaris 10 (it's free!), a current Solaris Express Developer Edition (it's free too, but more advanced) is recommended. My home server runs Solaris Express build 62, I'm waiting for a production-ready build of Project Indiana to upgrade to.

I'm also assuming that you are familiar with basic compilation and installation of open source products.

Whenever I compile and install a new software package from scratch, I use /opt/local as my base directory. Others may want to use /usr/local or some other directory (perhaps in their $HOME). Just make sure you use the right path in the --prefix=/your/favourite/install/path part of the ./configure command.

I'm also trying to be a good citizen and use the Sun Studio Compiler here where I can. It generally produces much faster code on both SPARC and x86 architectures vs. the ubiquitous gcc, so give it a try! Alas, sometimes the code was really stubborn and it wouldn't let me use Sun Studio so I had to use gcc. This was the path of least resistance, but with some tinkering, everything can be made to compile on Sun Studio. You can also try gcc4ss which combines a gcc frontend with the Sun Studio backend to get the best of both worlds.

Now, let's get started!

MediaTomb Prerequisites

Before compiling/installing the actual MediaTomb application, we need to install a few prerequisite packages. Don't worry, most of them are already present in Solaris, and the rest can be easily installed as pre-built binaries or easily compiled on your own. Check out the MediaTomb requirements documentation. Here is what MediaTomb wants:

sqlite3, libiconv and curl are available on BlastWave. BlastWave is a software repository for Solaris packages that has almost everything you need in terms of pre-built open source packages (but not MediaTomb...). Setting up BlastWave on your system is easy, just follow their guide. After that, installing the three packages above is as easy as:
```
# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i sqlite3
# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i libiconv
# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i curl
```
MediaTomb uses a library called libmagic to identify file types. It took a little research until I found out that it is part of the file package that is shipped as part of many Linux distributions. Here I'm using file-4.23.tar.gz, which seems to be a reasonably new version. Fortunately, this is easy to compile and install:
```
$ wget ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/file-4.23.tar.gz
$ gzip -dc  file-4.23.tar.gz | tar xvf -$ cd file-4.23
$ CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc ./configure --prefix=/opt/local
$ gmake
$ su
# PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/sfw/bin; export PATH; gmake install
```
Notice that the last step is performed as root for installation purposes while compilation should generally be performed as a regular user.

For tag extraction of MP3 files, MediaTomb uses taglib:

$ wget http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/files/src/taglib-1.5.tar.gz
$ cd taglib-1.5
$ CC=/usr/sfw/bin/gcc CXX=/usr/sfw/bin/g++ ./configure --prefix=/opt/local
$ gmake
$ su
# PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/sfw/bin; export PATH; gmake install

MediaTomb also uses SpiderMonkey, which is the Mozilla JavaScript Engine. Initially, I had some fear about having to compile all that Mozilla code from scratch, but then it dawned on me that we can just use the JavaScript libraries that are part of the Solaris Firefox standard installation, even the headers are there as well!

That was it. Now we can start building the real thing...

Compiling and installing MediaTomb

Now that we have all prerequisites, we can move on to downloading, compiling and installing the MediaTomb package:

Download the MediaTomb source from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mediatomb/mediatomb-0.11.0.tar.gz
Somehow, the mediatomb developers want to enforce some funny LD_PRELOAD games which is uneccesary (at least on recent Solaris versions...). So let's throw that part of the code out: Edit src/main.cc and comment lines 128-141 out by adding /* before line 128 and */ at the end of line 141.

Now we can configure the source to our needs. This is where all the prerequisite packages from above are configured in:

./configure
--prefix=/opt/local --enable-iconv-lib --with-iconv-h=/opt/csw/include
--with-iconv-libs=/opt/csw/lib --enable-libjs
--with-js-h=/usr/include/firefox/js --with-js-libs=/usr/lib/firefox
--enable-libmagic --with-magic-h=/opt/local/include
--with-magic-libs=/opt/local/lib --with-sqlite3-h=/opt/csw/include
--with-sqlite3-libs=/opt/csw/lib
--with-taglib-cfg=/opt/local/bin/taglib-config
--with-curl-cfg=/opt/csw/bin/curl-config

Check out the MediaTomb compile docs for details. One hurdle here was to use an extra iconv library because the MediaTomb source didn't work with the gcc built-in iconv library. Also, there were some issues with the Sun Studio compiler, so I admit I was lazy and just used gcc instead.

After these preparations, compiling and installing should work as expected:
```
gmake
PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/sfw/bin; export PATH; gmake install
```

Configuring MediaTomb

Ok, now we have successfully compiled and installed MediaTomb, but we're not done yet. The next step is to create a configuration file that works well. An initial config will be created automatically during the very first startup of MediaTomb. Since we compiled in some libraries from different places, we either need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH during startup (i.e. in a wrapper script) or update the linker's path using crle(1).

In my case, I went for the first option. So, starting MediaTomb works like this:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib:/opt/local/lib:/usr/lib/firefox
/opt/local/bin/mediatomb --interface bge0 --port 49194 --daemon
--pidfile /tmp/mediatomb.pid
--logfile=/tmp/mediatomb.log

Of course you should substitute your own interface. The port number is completely arbitrary, it should just be above 49152. Read the command line option docs to learn how they work.

You can now connect to MediaTomb's web interface and try out some stuff, but the important thing here is that we now have a basic config file in $HOME/.mediatomb/config.xml to work with. The MediaTomb config file docs should help you with this.

Here is what I added to my own config and why:

Set up an account for the web user interface with your own user id and password. It's not the most secure server, but better than nothing. Use something like this in the <ui> section:
```
<accounts enabled="no" session-timeout="30">
  <account user="me" password="secret"/>
</accounts>
```
Uncomment the <protocolInfo> tag because according to the docs, this is needed for better PS3 compatibility.
I saw a number of iconv errors, so I added the following to the config file in the import section. Apparently, MediaTomb can better handle exotic characters in file names (very common with music files) with the following tag:
```
<filesystem-charset>ISO-8859-1</filesystem-charset> 
```
The libmagic library won't find its magic information because it's now in a nonstandard place. But we can add it with the following tag, again in the import section:
```
<magic-file>/opt/local/share/file/magic</magic-file>
```
A few mime types should be added for completeness:
```
<map from="mpg" to="video/mpeg"/>
<map from="JPG" to="image/jpeg"/>
<map from="m4a" to="audio/mpeg"/>
```
Actually, it should "just work" through libmagic, but it didn't for me, so adding theses mime types was the easiest option. It also improves performance through saving libmagic calls. Most digital cameras use the uppercase "JPG" extension and MediaTomb seems to be case-sensitive so adding the uppercase variant was necessary. It's also apparent that MediaTomb doesn't have much support for AAC (.m4a) even though it is the official successor to MP3 (more than 95% of my music is in AAC format, so this is quite annoying).
You can now either add <directory> tags to the <autoscan> tags for your media data in the config file, or add them through the web interface.

MediaTomb browser on a PS3 This is it. The pictures show MediaTomb running in my basement and showing some photos through the PS3 on the TV set. I hope that you can now work from here and find a configuration that works well for you. Check out the MediaTomb scripting guide for some powerful ways to create virtual directory structures of your media files.

MediaTomb is ok to help you show movies and pictures and the occasional song on the PS3 but it's not perfect yet. It lacks support for AAC (tags, cover art, etc.) and it could use some extra scripts for more comfortable browsing structures. But that's the point of open source: Now we can start adding more features to MediaTomb ourselves and bring it a few steps closer to usefulness.

"How to compile/run MediaTomb on Solaris for PS3 and other streaming clients" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-03-20 15:07:08.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
compiling diy howto installing media mediatomb open playstation ps3 software solaris source streaming
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
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