FAQ¶

I am on Ubuntu and Rygel reports “access denied” for folders that used to work previously¶

This is due to AppArmor shipping a tunable for Rygel which tries to limit access to the three XDG folders $HOME/Pictures, $HOME/Videos and $HOME/Music. Unfortunately, this can lead to two problems:

It is no longer possible to share any media outside of those three folders
If you are on a locale that is not english, it is not possible to share any media at all, since the localized folder names do not match the AppArmor rules.

You can disable this by using the commands below. Please do this on your own judgement whether you want to disable this rule or not.

sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/rygel /etc/apparmor.d/disable/
sudo apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/rygel
systemctl --user restart rygel

Rygel seems unwilling to bind to any interface other than 127.0.0.1, despite -n or interfaces=¶

A symptom for this problem is that you can not see the Rygel server on your network. You can confirm that this is an issue by running Rygel with debug output, and look for lines like this:

(rygel:4791): Rygel-DEBUG: rygel-main.vala:137: New network 127.0.0.0 (lo) context available. IP: 127.0.0.1

If you only get the above line, and nothing about eth0 or wlan0 (in addition to lo), or any other interface, this indicates that you are using GUPnP which is compiled with the NetworkManager context manager and NetworkManager is running, but you’re not using it for global device configuration but relying on e.g. /etc/network/interfaces. Possible solutions

Switch to NetworkManager.
Recompile GUPnP with the “linux” context manager.

Rygel keeps changing its UUID on every start¶

Make sure that your system time is set correctly and not to a point in the past. Otherwise Rygel will think that its device description templates have been updated and when device descriptions are updated it will start with a fresh UUID. You can verify whether this is the issue or not by issuing

[ $(stat -c %Y /usr/share/rygel/xml/MediaServer3.xml) -gt  $(date +%s) ] \
    && echo "System time older than template mtime"

Also make sure that the home directory of the user running Rygel is on a non-volatile file-system (More specifically, XDG_CONFIG_HOME needs to be on a non-volatile file-system).

Lastly, it is also possibly to override the UUID in rygel.conf. See its manpage for details.

Rygel does not find any of its plugins¶

If you compiled rygel from scratch inside jhbuild or similar environment, make sure you have shared-mime-info installed as well. Otherwise the plugin detection will not work (and the MediaExport plugin will have problems as well)

Rygel is only seen by other devices when started but cannot be found otherwise¶

If you’re running Rygel on a bridge network device (brX), try to disable IGMP snooping. If that’s not the case, please file a bug against GSSDP including a packet capture.

In certain environments, MediaExport’s meta-data extracting helper binary seems to lock up on start-up. This is related to libmediaart starting volume monitors. There is no solution to this yet. Installing GVFS and having a D-Bus session bus is reported to help on some occasions.