Raspberry Pi 3 as featherweight headless media renderer

During the past years I've been trying to find a media center to accommodate my local data. Despite my efforts of gardening my music metadata properly, they all fail, mainly because it's far from a usual set of stuff. I have:

• films with multiple audio- and subtitle tracks in various formats, ranging from avi through mkv packed ogg vorbis to mere mp4
• foreign films with Hungarian dub
• music folders with hundreds of randomly thrown together tracks with deliberately deleted album information
• and so on

Despite the complexity, it's organised. If you open the library in a file manager, the layout is trivial and it's fairly simple to browse or find whatever you're after.

Most modern media centers which rely heavily on gathering data from the internet, fail hard: some never even find the movies - Plex¹, I'm looking at you, especially since you became quite agressive with their you really ought to subscribe message. Others, with plugins and manual help, like Emby², excel at movies, but simply overheat at music collections by trying to force everything in one folder into one album. Sithicus from Sanguis in Nocte is really not part of the 100 Best Trance Songs compalation.

Different solutions, like Nextcloud³ are already slow and heavy; adding media to it really doesn't help. Ampache⁴ feels dated, and no matter how many times I tried, I failed to properly set it up as DNLA/UPnP system.

Apart from the library issues, the other problem is DLNA/UPnP itself. If you're not familiar with the idea or the details, the short summary if the following every setup would have:

• server
• renderer
• controller

The server contains (or connects to) and manages the data and the library; the renderer shows the content; the controllers tells the renderer what to play. The problem is that my main renderer, an LG Netcast TV, is simple. It's so simple that it can about play wav, mp3, mpeg2, x264, and that's it. Things like flac, vorbis, x265, etc would all need to be transcoded. Plex doesn't support ogg and flac. Emby does, but the transcoding doesn't really suit a 10W TDP CPU that's already serving websites, and an NFS server. Whenever transcoding wasn't needed, like most of the music, the TV kept asking for permission at every.single.track. to allow to play if one was using a controller, and not the built-in media browser.

So I tried another approach: Kodi⁵, OSMC⁶, and LibreELEC⁷ on a Raspberry Pi. Again, they tried to be way too smart and complicated, and none of them offered a simple File Browser mode, or something like that. Also, all of them are oriented to either touchscreens or fancy remote controls.

Once I arrived at this point two thoughts popped up in my mind.

1. I want have to make this simpler.
2. Hang on, had I not done this once already?

Local music

When I first decided to run a home music center, I started with MPD⁸. MPD, while not that old, is still 17 years old. And it's rock solid. What it does: picks music libraries, plays them to various outputs, and allows to be remote controlled over the network. That's it. No metadata fetching daemons, no uber fancy web interface. And it can use nfs shares on the fly. And it has a browse files view.

apt install mpd

/etc/mpd.conf

music_directory         "nfs://home.server/music/library"
playlist_directory      "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
db_file                 "/var/lib/mpd/tag_cache"
log_file                "/var/log/mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file                "/run/mpd/pid"
state_file              "/var/lib/mpd/state"
sticker_file            "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.sql"
user                    "mpd"
bind_to_address         "0.0.0.0"
port                    "6600"
auto_update             "no"
zeroconf_enabled        "yes"
zeroconf_name           "mpd @ rasbperry"
filesystem_charset      "UTF-8"

input {
        plugin "curl"
}

audio_output {
        type            "alsa"
        name            "ALSA"
}

There are plenty of clients to control it; on Android, I prefer M.A.L.P.⁹ whereas on desktop, gmpc¹⁰

I have a Topping MX3¹¹ connected to the Raspberry. In order to have that as default output, /etc/asound.conf needs to exists with:

defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1

Local video

omxplayer

omxplayer¹² is a Raspberry Pi native player, which has a rather impressive performance, due to the hardware accelation it utilises on the Pi. While omxplayer itself doesn't have a HTTP interface, it can easily be started over SSH, plus there's and android app, OMX Remote (Raspberry Pi)¹³ which does exactly this for you.

It's a lot faster, than VLC, and certainly has less bugs.

VLC

UPDATE: I added the section under omxplayer - I had a lof of trouble with VLC after writing this article.

I'm aware Kodi & Friends have web interfaces, but that doesn't make them less wannabe smart. Then I remember that I used to have VLC¹⁴ with it's HTTP interface on as player.

apt install vlc dbus-x11

It's a little tricker to launch it on a headless system - meaning no X server -, but not that bad:

/lib/systemd/system/cvlc.service

[Unit]
Description=Headless VLC service
After=network.target sound.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=mpd
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/default/cvlc
Environment="HTTP_PORT=8080"
Environment="HTTP_PASSWORD=12345678"
Environment="ALSA_DEVICE=hw:CARD=ALSA,DEV=0"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dbus-launch -- /usr/bin/vlc -A alsa --alsa-audio-device ${ALSA_DEVICE} -I http --http-port ${HTTP_PORT} --http-password ${HTTP_PASSWORD} --media-library

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The dbus-x11 package contains the dbus-launch command, which allows the service to start in a non-x environment properly. The ALSA device selected in this case is the built-in HDMI; aplay -L gives the list of options.

Unfortunately, unlike MPD, VLC can't directly use NFS shares, so it needs to be mounted by hand by adding this to /etc/fstab:

home.server:/media/library /media nfs ro,hard,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14 0 0

Once done, with a remote control, like VlcFreemote¹⁵ on android, the whole filesystem can be browsed, including the NFS mount. This way there's not transcoding problem, no mis-identified media problem, and all the subtitles/tracks are available.

Spotify

Yes, I use Spotify. Yes, I should buy albums. Trouble is: the CD is not that good business for the artist either, so unless I can buy on Bandcamp directly from the band, I'm ok with Spotify. I will, and always had been trying to go live gigs, because that is an actual support, plus a whole different, hopefully unique experience.

I mentioned I went down similar roads a while ago but that was before Spotify Connect appeared. I gave mopidy with it's spotify plugin¹⁶ a go, but it wasn't working nicely, so instead, I used to run the full fledged Spotify client in a mocked X environment with xfvb. Sometimes is worked. Sometimes.

Eventually I stumbled upon spotifyd¹⁷ and raspotify¹⁸. Tried both, with raspotify came out as winner - it shows up as speaker over Wi-Fi properly, allowing other accounts to use it and see it as well. It has nice install guide, and basicall doesn't need any special trickery to work.

A maybe-working DLNA/UPnP setup

The trial and search journey that dragged me across these experiences introduced a nice project: gmrender-resurrect¹⁹. This is a picked up and continued project of an old, abandoned software, GMediaRenderer, which was made to be an audio (and potentially video, but I still can't get that running, no matter, what) DLNA renderer for linux. Combined with pulseaudio-dlna²⁰ it's possible to stream the audio of anything

• in-browser youtube, etc - onto my speakers via the raspberry.

Unfortunately, pulseaudio-dlna itself can get rather choppy and slow; it works fine on my XFCE desktop, but not with my wife's Cinnamon.

If I ever make it work properly, I'm hoping I can add the codecs into gmrender itself, making the problem of the lack of codecs disappear, and use a simple minidlna²¹ to be my media server again. Talking about minidlna: it has a fork, that, in theory, can transcode if needed: ReadyMedia-transcode²².

I'm going to stick to MPD, VLC, raspotify, for now. It's working. Not the nicest, shiniest setup, but it does what I'm asking for. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, where having information, maybe even trailers, can be important. With my own collection, especially with the music and the ripped CDs of street musicians, I know what I'm looking at, I don't need overly smart media centers with their mistakes and CPU baking capabilities.

(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)