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Beaglebone Media Center

Chapter 1. Transforming Your BeagleBone Black into a Media Server

Sharing files, watching movies, listening to music, and all the other media-related activities are abundantly proposed as Internet services. Any provider can propose an MP3 aside books and eggs; you have to choose among subscriptions that most of the time include items that you don't need or never use. The chapters in this book won't discuss these online services that, if you do the math, cost you a lot, including questioning your privacy, of course. Instead, you are going to be like these providers, and the best one too. Why the best? Because you are the person who is best placed to know what you need. Indeed, as you will know how to implement the services that please you, you'll have the functionalities that will suit you the most.

Your server, your rules

The solution that we are going to implement is based on different software, according to our choices. I mean real choices. Quoting Wikipedia, a server can be defined as follows:

A server is a running instance of an application (software) capable of accepting requests from the client and giving responses accordingly. Servers can run on any computer including dedicated computers, which individually are also often referred to as "the server."

Powerful and straightforward software installations

That being said, you want a media server but you are not comfortable with these technologies, which might scare you or put you off. The applications used in this book are really straightforward to install and use; particularly, open source applications have been selected.

Using dedicated hardware

Additionally, we are going to use an embedded board instead of the heavy, large, and power-consuming PCs so that we can also drastically reduce the costs. While we will focus on BeagleBone Black in this book, the chapters have been written to use most of the boards available on the market, such as Raspberry Pi, WandBoard, CubieBoard, and some others, as long as the board supports Linux and has a network connection.

The main goal of this approach is that you learn to be independent enough so that the next time you receive a promotional e-mail with music streaming advertising, you'll throw it away, smiling proudly.

This chapter is about installing a MediaDrop server, which will be introduced shortly. As promised, it will be quite easy (really easy, in fact); no compilation or library will be invoked. Before the installation process itself, we will have a quick look at some situations that an embedded board is able to resolve. We will also find out why we should consider a server philosophy instead of a traditional computer. This will impact the remaining part of the book because the board will be accessed through an SSH connection; we will also have to take into consideration our available free space to store our applications and media contents. Then, we will start the installation part for the MediaDrop server itself. Management and security tasks have been split in additional chapters, so you can skip them and get back later if you want.

Welcome to the first step of your independence.

In this chapter, we will talk about the following topics:

Looking at daily scenarios for media usage
Down to the cave is a server without a head—headless servers
Preparing BeagleBone to be a server
Let's get acquainted with our friend – MediaDrop
MediaDrop installation steps
Testing time – "Hello Server"
Switching from development to production
Let's take a walk in our new MediaDrop server

Preparing BeagleBone to be a server

As mentioned previously, we will use the BeagleBone Black embedded board for our experiments. It is assumed that you will have completed the following:

After visiting the Getting Started page (http://beagleboard.org/getting-started) and executing all the mentioned steps, the board will be just started and you will be connected to it. All through the book, the PuTTY program was used for this.
The board is using the current official bone-debian-7.5-2014-05-14-2gb, which is related to a 2 GB SD card (as shown in the next screenshot). Nevertheless, it's strongly advised that you use cards with a larger size and we'll soon see why.
Your board is identified in your local network; when required, we'll use the address 192.168.0.15, which you will need to adapt according to your local network. Most of the rooters provide a web interface for this purpose.
The default credentials are debian as the username and temppwd as the password.

Booting from an SD Card or flash (eMMC)

BeagleBone Black has the advantage of booting either from an SD card or on-board flash (eMMC). The pros and cons of each of these is beyond the scope of this chapter. Generally, for this book, you should rely on the SD card support for the following reasons:

You can use all the space you want without sacrificing any other partition: On flash, you are limited to the provided space, which is again limited by design.
You can change your mind whenever you want: If you want to install all the applications described in this book, you can either use different SD cards or buy a bigger one.
It is an error-proof solution: If you have never burnt any electronic device or broken the code, you should. Of course, not intentionally but because you pushed the limits. Many inventions have been found by accident, such as Penicillin, Teflon, and even Brownies and Tatin tart. So, if sometimes you are not able to boot the system, you will always have the possibility to get back to the situation you started with, using the SD card, by writing a new image to it.
Tip
Here's a reminder: in order to boot to the SD card, just power on the board and keep pressing the "user button," the one near the SD card.

The SD card induces small additional latencies that you won't even notice, so it is better to use it as a sandbox. So feel free to explore and try crazy things so that you can learn without limitations and worry.

Extending the root limitations on a fresh installation

If you update or install anything right away after a boot, you will encounter problems related to disk space.

Indeed, if you use PuTTY (www.putty.org) or any other SSH software to connect yourself to the board (such as, 192.168.0.15) and look at the rootfs space information, you can guess that the available size will be quickly saturated.

Extending the root limitations on a fresh installation

The SD card has little space left the first time

So, as the server administrator, it is up to you to resolve the size constraints.

Note

Like everyone else, you might want to use an SD card with a bigger size. This will produce exactly the same result as in the preceding figure, as you will use the same partition scheme.

The next topic will describe how you can achieve this task easily.

Extending your root's partition

The default free space is really small; for example, you can fill it completely with just one upgrade. As a result, the very first thing to do at boot is to resize the /root partition.

Resizing a partition is not recommended for first timers. The good news is that you won't have to enter many commands; you can make your life easy by relying on a dedicated script provided with the board, which will do all that for you.

Enter the following two commands:

debian@beaglebone:~$ cd /opt/scripts/tools/
debian@beaglebone:/opt/scripts/tools/$ git pull

In this directory, we have downloaded the last code from the official repository, so we can start the script thereafter:

debian@beaglebone:/opt/scripts/tools/$ sudo ./grow_partition.sh

While running, this script will display a lot of details, which, thanks to the author, you don't have to care about.

These are the commands that you won't have to learn

You can now go on to reboot your board (don't forget to press the user's button), as follows:

debian@beaglebone:/opt/scripts/tools/$ sudo reboot

Now, if you check, you'll see that the free space has been resized to the SD card's capabilities.

An 8-GB resized SD card

Now, you can continue with the update and upgrade…

Tip

The local /root partition from the SD card is fast to implement and easy to use. Nevertheless, thinking about how you will organize your server is a good habit. Linux can handle multiple remote filesystems that you can write to. For instance, for all your media contents, you can use an NFS partition from a distant drive or a device that supports uPnP.

MediaDrop installation steps

The following sections will take you through the installation of Mediadrop.

BBB Debian – prerequisites

Now that your system is ready to accept all the applications you want to install, let's begin with the MySQL part:

debian@beaglebone:~$ install mysql-server mysql-client

Note

Actually, sudo apt-get install works behind the scenes. From this point onwards, we'll rely on aliases to ease our life from the command line. Refer to the Appendix to get all the details.

During this you'll be asked for the database's root password, then the remaining system files:

debian@beaglebone:~$ install libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev libmysqlclient-dev python-dev

Finally, the Python-related requirements that will help you in virtual environments can be installed using the following command:

debian@beaglebone:~$ install python-setuptools python-virtualenv

With system requirements in place, you can set up MediaDrop in just six installation steps. Before doing that, you need to define a database for it.

Setting up a dedicated database

You need to create some credentials and assign a user to a new MediaDrop database. It requires you to type only a few commands. If this is something that you don't want to do, the script is available on the GitHub companion website at https://github.com/dlewin/BeagleboneBlack-Server-Book.

Just execute the following command:

./create_mediadropdb.sh

Instead, if you are like me and want to control your entire system, then open a MySQL console, and pay attention to the syntax of the following command (with the ;):

debian@beaglebone:~$ mysql –u root –p

Then, fill in the password you have defined in the installation steps.

You will now have access to the MySQL console for all the database operations that MediaDrop requires. Now, perform the following steps:

Create your user with a password:

create user 'debian'@'localhost'IDENTIFIED BY 'temppwd';

Create the MediaDrop database; pay attention to the use of capital letters:
```
create database MediaDrop;
```
Now, we tell that we want to work on this database:
```
use MediaDrop;
```

Set some rights on this database for the debian user:

grant create,insert,update,select,delete on MediaDrop.* to debian@localhost;

exit

Here's a screenshot that shows these operations along with the related MySQL feedback you should get:

Step 1 – set up a Python virtual environment

MediaDrop has been programmed in Python, a simple but powerful language that we'll also use in Chapter 6, Illuminate Your Imagination with Your Own Projects. As plugins are also in Python, you are free to extend the platform as you wish.

Let's see how to define a dedicated environment for this purpose.

Step 1 – set up a Python virtual environment

Virtual environments introduce a functionality provided with Python that I like to use: actually, with this functionality, you can resolve the problems of software versions and incompatibility. The principle is to use as many virtual spaces with different packages or executables as you want without any confusion that might create a broken system. Thanks to the isolation provided by this tool, you are guaranteed that it is kept as you want it to be and thus you always have a safe system.

Note

If you want to know more about virtualenv, take a look at https://virtualenv.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. There is also a virtualenvwrapper that is intended to ease the creation and deletion of many virtual environments at https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.

Currently, we are using the 0.10.3 version of MediaDrop, but nothing stops you from trying the next version in order to test any side effects on your architecture. Thus, instead of executing the current environment, you'll just have to start MediaDrop from the n+1 environment.

Virtual environment is presented just here, but you should create an environment each time you need different usages of an application or dependencies. It requires just less than a minute and can be done by performing the following steps:

Create the environment with a specific name; in our case, venv:
```
debian@beaglebone:~$ virtualenv --distribute venv
```

Enter the dedicated virtual environment:

debian@beaglebone:~$ source venv/bin/activate

That's all! You are in now. Cool, eh?

The command prompt is preceded by the virtual environment's name, so you can guess which environment is currently activated, which is shown in the screenshot that follows the code:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~$

You can now install any package you want; it will only be accessible in the currently activated environment.

Step 2 – installing MediaDrop

For installation, retrieve the last stable release from downloads:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~$ mkdir MediaDrop
(venv)debian@beaglebone:~$ cd MediaDrop
(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ wget http://static.mediadrop.net/releases/MediaCore-0.10.3.tar.gz

Note

You can find all the releases at http://static.mediadrop.net/releases/.

Then, perform the following steps:

Extract the archive:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ tar xvzf MediaCore-0.10.3.tar.gz

Enter the new directory to launch the installation script:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ cd MediaCore-0.10.3

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop/MediaCore-0.10.3$ python setup.py develop

This will take a few minutes, as it checks and downloads the required dependencies, and will end with the following lines:

Finished processing dependencies for MediaCore==0.10.3

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop/MediaCore-0.10.3$ cd ..

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$

From here, the recommended installation is to enter the following:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ paster make-config MediaCore production.ini

This will generate the production.ini file, which the server will use as a configuration file. So, we can adapt by editing it.

Step 3 – basic configuration file

What we want to do here is tell which database we created and the related credentials. So, edit the production.ini file, with nano (or vim) in order to focus on the [app:main] section, as we want to change the following line:

sqlalchemy.url = mysql://username:pass@localhost/dbname?charset=utf8&use_unicode=0

The settings are shown in the following screenshot:

At the same time, as port 8080 is already used, let's change this to an available port, something such as 8082. As you'll see later on, many servers use the 8080 port for their configuration settings, and obviously only one application will be able to use this port, which means that according to your configurations, you will have to decide which application will use the 8080 port.

Note

Additionally, you can eventually customize your configuration file with an e-mail that will let you receive notifications from the server. You will then need to install a local SMTP server and apply the settings in this production.ini file at the [DEFAULT] section.

Now, save and quit the editor. We are done with the configuration part.

Step 4 – copying content from the initial data

We have completed all the configuration steps, and we are now going to deploy all the website data content.

To do this, copy the data directory from the sources to be at the same level as your production.ini file:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ cp -a MediaCore-0.10.3/data/.

Give it the write permissions for the debian user; when some content is uploaded, it will be written here:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ chmod 666 data

Step 5 – filling the server database and contents

It's now time to fill the MediaDrop database we've created previously with some tables and required data. We just have to call a predefined command:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ paster setup-app deployment.ini

Step 6 (optional) – full-text searching

Create some triggers that will allow you to have better searches than exact matches, as follows:

(venv)debian@beaglebone:~/MediaDrop$ mysql -u root -proot MediaDrop < MediaCore-0.10.3/setup_triggers.sql

Nothing else is remaining; we are in. Time to start our first server!

Description

Whether you are a hobbyist or a professional, this book will get you fully equipped to resolve the most commonly occurring media-related challenges. If you want to expand your horizons beyond lighting an LED and push the limits of your board, this is just the book for you. Working knowledge of BeagleBone is assumed.

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Daniel Sep 16, 2015

Très pédagogique : l'art de rendre simple et attrayante une technologie qui semble réservée aux spécialistes. Donne une très bonne idée de tout ce qu'on peut faire, et à faible coût, avec une carte BeagleBone !

Amazon Verified review

Michael0310 Jun 19, 2015

Introduction============The book BeagleBone Media Center by David Lewin is delivered as a guide on how to use the BeagleBone or BeagleBone Black from BeagleBoard.org and open source software packages to create a media center that you own and control. The author argues that this can be useful for personal use as well as business.Chapter Overview============This book is organized into six chapters.The first three chapters are basic motivation and introduction, including installation and usage instructions for MediaDrop which is the open source software of choice for powering the media center.Chapter 4 is a detailed section on setting up your BeagleBone Black, webcam, and MediaDrop software to support webcam streaming. I don't know if this really fits with the theme of a "Media Center" but it was a really cool and seemingly useful project either way. This was probably my favorite chapter.Chapter 5 is the only chapter that is truly BeagleBone specific and described some of the more relevant capes (add on hardware) available for the BeagleBone as well as how to install and use Android OS on the board.The final chapter closes with an encouragement to use your creativity and come up with your own projects. While I love and completely agree with the sentiment, the project example given (controlling an LED matrix through a client server connection with a Qt based GUI on the client) doesn't really seem like a good fit. I don't see how that project is related to media center usage and the author never clarifies this connection. I believe it would have been much more useful if the author showed how to do something like set up a GUI client for controlling media playback on the server for example.Pros============- Easy to follow examples.- Emphasis on Open Source.- MediaDrop (the chosen software) is Python based which makes it easy to extend for your own purposes.- Even though the book is marketed as a BeagleBone Black specific book it would would nearly as well for any single-board computer.- Author provided some interesting use cases that I hadn't considered to be typical for "media centers".Cons============- The author often fails to really provide sufficient motivation.- There are typos scattered throughout, none of them are major and they don't affect any of the examples but the book could have used another editing pass.- The author is not a native english speaker. I began to have suspicions early on due to some strange sentence structures and word choices, my suspicion was later confirmed in a screenshot in which the primary language is French. This will likely not be an issue if you are also not a native English speaker but it did cause some parts of the book to be more confusing than necessary for me.Conclusion============Overall, the book reads as an in depth user guide for MediaDrop on an embedded platform. Most of the examples are not specific to the BeagleBone and could easily be adapted for use on other systems. While there are some typos and strange sentence structures, the book is generally an easy read and the examples are very clear and easy to follow. I recommend BeagleBone Media Center if you are looking for an easy to follow guide on how to get your BeagleBone set up as a media hub.

Beaglebone Media Center: A practical guide to transforming your BeagleBone into a fully functional media center

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