UPnP clients for Linux

Networked media in the home using protocols such as UPnP is sure to grow hugely in popularity. An Android app such as Skifta allows access to all available UPnP-compliant AV servers both locally and remotely and the media can be streamed to any UPnP-compliant device. In practical terms this allows media to be streamed around the house using a smartphone  as a "remote".

There are three principal elements to a UPnP system:

• the AV media servers, in my case these are MythTV and the smartphone itself
• a control point (such as Skifta on a Smartphone), enabling you to browse the media and stream it to a UPnP-compliant device
• the media renderer which resides on a device such as a PC or a piece of dedicated UPnP hardware and which plays the media 

When I installed Skifta on an Android smartphone, the MythTV AV server was immediately discovered by Skifta. I installed XBMC on a reasonably high specification Linux client and it worked fine as a media renderer (Skifta support recommended XBMC under Linux).

I also needed a media renderer for a much lower specification PC. On this PC, XBMC made the machine unusable because it consumed so much memory.

It proved difficult to find other media renderers under Linux. A UPnP Linux client like Rhythmbox can access media using the UPnP protocol (e.g. it can "see" the media on a mythtv server) but I found a "client" in this sense was not discoverable by Skifta. One solution I identified was a useful project called gmrender-resurrect, a fork of an earlier, incomplete project (GMediaRender). This software is designed primarily for devices like the Raspberry pi but is equally usefully for older conventional hardware running Linux.