Rygel FAQ

How do I enable debug output?

Run rygel like this:

$ G_MESSAGES_DEBUG=all rygel -g 5

Instead of -g 5, you can edit the log level in the rygel.conf file, as described in the man page.

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"

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).

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 occations.

Rygel does not work with my Sony device

Please update your Rygel and your GStreamer.

I've added directories in the preferences ui but they are not shared

You did not restart Rygel. Some of the changes are currently not picked up automatically. You can force a restart through the ui by ticking/unticking the "Share media through DLNA" checkbox.
You're using the Tracker plug-in. The preferences ui modifies the shared directories of the MediaExport plug-in only. To change the directories indexed by Tracker, you need to use "tracker-preferences".

When trying to stream I get 404 on client and "(rygel:31790): Rygel-WARNING **: rygel-http-request.vala:100: Not found" on the server

The error message is slightly misleading and has been improved in recent releases. What Rygel is trying to tell you here is that you're missing a GStreamer plug-in. If you followed the various Rygel + Pulseaudio + GstLaunch tutorials and are on Ubuntu, it's most likely that you're missing the gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio package.

I have installed tumbler but I still don't get any thumbnails

Unfortunately tumbler and recent GLib seem to disagree on the location of the thumbnail cache. Tumbler uses the old $HOME/.thumbnails while GLib switched to the new $XDG_USER_CACHE/thumbnails. As a work-around, make one a symbolic link of the other.