Raspberry Pi UPnP media player

My immediate thought of what to do with my RPi was to set it up so that I could stream audio to the kitchen. I wanted to be able to listen to my music collection (stored on an XBMC server) and podcasts (from my phone), and be able to control everything from my phone. I achieved this by setting up the RPi as a UPnP media renderer, with XBMC as the UPnP media server and my phone as the UPnP control point (and media server). It runs the very minimal GMediaRender on the RPi Debian image. Below is a little tutorial on how I did it:

Packages

Firstly, install all the required software:

sudo apt-get install alsa-base alsa-tools alsa-utils gstreamer0.10-alsa \
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-plugins-base \
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-dev \
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-tools libupnp-dev automake cvs

ALSA setup

Make sure that the username you’re using has permission to access the sound card:

sudo useradd -G audio <username>

To enable the sound card, you need to add the following line to /etc/modules:

snd_bcm2835

After you do that, reboot the machine so that the module is loaded:

sudo reboot

To make sure that ALSA is working, list the devices:

aplay -l

You should see something like this:

card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]

If you want to use the headphone socket instead of audio over HDMI, you’ll need to change the setting:

sudo amixer cset numid=3 1

Finally – to check the sound is working – run the speaker test:

speaker-test

GMediaRender setup

EDIT: As the GMediaRender project appears to be dormant and have some missing features, Henner Zeller has resurrected it back into life in the form of GMediaRender-resurrect. You’re probably better off using his code instead.

You’ll want to use the very latest version of GMediaRender, which can be downloaded from here using CVS:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/gmrender co .

Once that downloads, run the following commands to compile and install the program:

cd gmrender
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Now, for the moment of truth, navigate to your home directory and launch the program:

gmediarender -f "Raspberry Pi"

You should be able to use any UPnP control point (such as BubbleUPnP) to send audio from a UPnP media server (like XBMC) to your RPi.

Launch on boot

I’ve been trying to set it up so that GMediaRender launches on boot so that I don’t have to log in every time. None of the techniques I’ve tried so far (crontab @reboot, /etc/rc.local, .bashrc) have worked, so any suggestions are welcome 🙂

EDIT: @MJFComputerServ has kindly pointed me towards this article which explains how to write a /etc/init.d script to launch a program.

Do do this for GMediaRender, copy the following to /etc/init.d/gmediarender

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: gmediarender
# Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start GMediaRender at boot time
# Description: Start GMediaRender at boot time.
### END INIT INFO
#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/gmediarender
USER=root
HOME=/root
export USER HOME
case "$1" in
 start)
 echo "Starting GMediaRender"
 /usr/local/bin/gmediarender -f "Raspberry Pi"
 ;;
stop)
 echo "Stopping GMediaRender"
 killall gmediarender
 ;;
*)
 echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/gmediarender {start|stop}"
 exit 1
 ;;
esac
exit 0

Make the file executable:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/gmediarender

And configure the system to run it on startup:

sudo update-rc.d gmediarender defaults

Works for me – let me know how you get on!