BeagleBone Media Center

Table of Contents

BeagleBone Media Center

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Transforming Your BeagleBone Black into a Media Server

The choice that is not yours

You'll still be restricted by their proposals

You hardly manage your own content

Your server, your rules

Powerful and straightforward software installations

Using dedicated hardware

Looking at daily scenarios for media usage

Down in the cave is a server without a head – headless servers

Preparing BeagleBone to be a server

Booting from an SD Card or flash (eMMC)

Extending the root limitations on a fresh installation

Extending your root's partition

Let's get acquainted with our friend – MediaDrop

MediaDrop installation steps

BBB Debian – prerequisites

Setting up a dedicated database

Step 1 – set up a Python virtual environment

Step 2 – installing MediaDrop

Step 3 – basic configuration file

Step 4 – copying content from the initial data

Step 5 – filling the server database and contents

Step 6 (optional) – full-text searching

Testing time – Hello Server

Switching from development to production

Let's take a walk in our new MediaDrop server

Your first administrator action

General settings

Site name

Default language

Appearance

Categories

Comments

Notification e-mails

Players

Popularity

Tags

Upload

File size limit

Storage engines

Self-test questions

Summary

2. Media Management, Shares, and Social Activities

How to use MediaDrop through workflows

Why approvals are required

Publishing your media

Auto administrated contents

Administrator tasks

Exploring different ways to access your media

Self-test questions

Summary

3. Examples of Real-world Situations

Introducing the security role

An everyday use case – a house in Springfield

Defining your users list

Understanding role attributions

Group management

Applying groups and users

Second use case – media management in a company

Managing policies and groups

Self-test questions

Summary

4. Getting Your Own Video and Feeds

Detecting the hardware device and installing drivers and libraries for a webcam

How to know your webcam

Setting up your webcam

Installing and running MJPG-Streamer

Installing MJPG-Streamer

Starting the application

Let's add some security

I'm famous – your first stream

Using our stream across the network

Starting the streaming service automatically on boot

Exploring new capabilities to install

Plugins

Another tool for the webcam

Configuring RSS feeds with Leed

Creating the environment for Leed in three steps

Creating a database for Leed

Downloading the project code and setting permissions

Installing Leed

Setting up a cron job for feed updates

Using Leed to add your RSS feed

Some Leed preferences settings in a server environment

Extending Leed with plugins

Summary

5. Building Your Media Player

Introducing BeagleBone capes

Exploring capes' categories

Considering a personal Palm Media player

Functional description

Physical description

Installing a system for the expansion board

Looking at the available operating systems

Retrieving the latest files, images, documentation, or software

Installing drivers

Prerequisites for installing any system

Considering a virtual machine

Finding your SD card device

Listing devices with lsblk

Using the dmesg utility

Checking your investigation

Adapting foreign systems for the installer script

Installing your system

Installing and using Android

Installing and using Debian

Installing and using TI EZSDK

Taking a look at TI's linux unique tools

TI's website

Developing with Qt

Using the expansion board with Android

Using files from a computer

Installing applications

Games

Watching and listening to media

Summary

6. Illuminate Your Imagination with Your Own Projects

Presenting the matrix revolution

The LED matrix

Introducing I2C

Wiring the matrix to the board

Diving into the software

Example 1 – our first client server application

Installing the requirements

Running the example

Jumping into the code

Description of the data packet

Describing the server code

Questions and suggestions related to this example

Example 2 – improving the first example by adding functionalities

From the client side

From the server side

Improving the client with Kivy

Questions and thoughts related to this example

Example 3 – creating animated graphical patterns

Following the project's requirements

Where to find help on the Internet

Looking at the differences from the previous example

Looking at the concepts of the matrix edition

Browsing the code

Compilation time

Describing the GUI

A quick tour of the code

Looking at the main functions

Questions and thoughts related to this example

Summary

A. Troubleshooting and Tricks to Improve Your Server

Ease your life with the command line

Package management

Get to know what you did previously

Different ways to find your files

All you need to know about open network ports

B. Ideas to Improve Your Server

MiniDLNA

Introducing MiniDLNA

What a DLNA server can do for you

Installing miniDLNA

Configuring and customizing miniDLNA

Subsonic

Installing Subsonic

Administering Subsonic

Changing users

Restarting the service to apply changes

Accessing configuration settings

Advanced configuration

Troubleshooting

Index

BeagleBone Media Center

BeagleBone Media Center

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing and its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: January 2015

Production reference: 1220115

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78439-999-3

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

David Lewin

Reviewers

Eric Feuilleaubois

Naoya Hashimoto

Pei JIA

Chidananda Matada Shivananda

Commissioning Editor

Amarabha Banerjee

Acquisition Editor

Larissa Pinto

Content Development Editor

Neeshma Ramakrishnan

Technical Editor

Faisal Siddiqui

Copy Editors

Dipti Kapadia

Rashmi Sawant

Project Coordinator

Danuta Jones

Proofreaders

Ameesha Green

Lawrence A. Herman

Indexer

Hemangini Bari

Production Coordinator

Manu Joseph

Cover Work

Manu Joseph

About the Author

David Lewin was introduced early to electronics and computers by TRS-80, Atari, and Commodore 64; he has never quit since then. He spends his free time watching out for technology for the next generation of embedded systems when he is not exploring philosophy.

David is a passionate and creative embedded developer who spent 20 years working for automotive companies such as Renault, Peugeot, and Faurecia, as well as for satellites with Thales Alenia Space. He currently works in Sophia Antipolis, the French Riviera Silicon Valley, designing industrial embedded systems.

A book is a real personal investment, and I'd like to thank Lisa for her patience, support, and advice. Thanks to my parents for supporting me in my early days; it is also thanks to them that I found the way to write to this book. Thanks to Sarah and Lisa as well. Thanks to Eric and Carol for their time and efforts. I'd like also to thank Neeshma and Larissa at Packt Publishing for their precious help. Besides, I'd also like to thank the open source community as they allow you to benefit from the BeagleBone hardware and software.

I would also like to thank Naoya, Rachel, and Jason (the syntaxic killer) for their great work as I really appreciate what they brought to the book.

About the Reviewers

Naoya Hashimoto has been working on system design and integration with open source software for years. In the past few years, his career and interests have been shifting toward cloud engineering mainly for AWS with orchestration tools such as Chef or CloudFormation.

He has reviewed Icinga Network Monitoring, Home Security System with BeagleBone, and Building networks and servers using BeagleBone, both by Packt Publishing:

Thanks to the author and project coordinator Danuta, who gave me this opportunity to review the book. I am very impressed with her work and this project because we can create a media center device with BeagleBone and open source software. I hope that we get more such opportunities to work with BeagleBone and other open source software.

Pei JIA holds a PhD degree in computer science from the University of Essex, with full financial aid by Overseas Research Studentship (ORS). He specializes in various computer vision algorithms (particularly, 2D and 3D morphable models) and has extensive embedded machine vision experience. He is the pioneer of advocating all kinds of