problems with install instructions

[waynea]

wrt to
Put the mpvDLNA folder in the /scripts folder for mpv ~/.config/mpv/scripts/ for Linux

I do not find this folder on my insall (linux Mint 22 Cinnamon edition). with

wayne@X1C6:/$ find  ~/.config/mpv/scripts/ 
find: ‘/home/wayne/.config/mpv/scripts/’: No such file or directory

in the directory /home/wayne/.config
I do find a file named mpv but with nothing in it so far. Should the mpvDLNA go in there?

mpv is installed from the Mint repo and the mpvlDLNA download and named correctly

thanks for help!!

[chachmu]

Sorry this took so long to respond to, as far as I can tell that is the correct location to put the files on mint as well. You will likely have to create the folder yourself since it is not already there. If you already have an mpv.conf or input.conf file the scripts folder just needs to be placed in the same folder as them.

If that still doesn't work let me know what method you used to install mpv (apt or software manager or something else) and I can try to figure out where your mpv config folder is supposed to be.

[waynea]

Hiya - and thanks for taking the time to reply.
I put the file in my .config/mpv directory. This is obviously correct because mpv finds it - but throws the error

the following python calls exist but do not have upnp client support installed properly; python, python3
at /home/wayne.config/mpv/scripts/mpvDLNA/main.js:155
at /home/wayne.config/mpv/scripts/mpvDLNA/main.js1:383
at /home/wayne.config/mpv/scripts/mpvDLNA/main.js:1387
at run_script (native)

so its saying thet upnpclient isnt installed, which is right. BUt how do I do that?
following instructions by running pip install uPnPclient throws the error

This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
    install.
     If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
    create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
    Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
    sure you have python3-full installed.
     If you wish to install a non-Debian packaged Python application,
    it may be easiest to use pipx install xyz, which will manage a
    virtual environment for you. Make sure you have pipx installed.

I guess I'm missing something here - can you spot what it is?

[chachmu]

Hey sorry I disappeared again. It seems like recently linux (or at least Ubuntu and Mint) have been moving to discourage installing pip packages at a system level. They really want you to install things in a virtual environment so it doesn't mess up your existing python packages. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty inconvenient for mpvDLNA to run its script since pipx won't work here and mpv is giving it a new session every time it opens so it would have to constantly reactivate the virtual environment.

I think as a short term fix the easiest option is to forcefully install the pip package system-wide (I'll leave it up to you if you want to try this option, it's kind of frowned upon but probably won't cause any issues if you only do it occasionally) by running pip install --break-system-packages upnpclient

Alternatively, you could maybe try installing upnpclient into a virtual environment and then specifying a custom command for mpvDLNA to run when it tries to run python. This could make mpvDLNA commands run a little slower but it wouldn't have any risk of breaking your system wide python packages.

1. Make sure you have venv installed for your version of python, for example for 3.12: sudo apt install python3.12-venv
2. Create the virtual environment where you want it: python3 -m venv /home/wayne.config/mpv/env
3. Install upnpclient in the virtual environment:
   1. source /home/wayne.config/mpv/env/bin/activate
   2. pip install upnpclient
   3. deactivate
4. Make an mpvDLNA config file at /home/wayne.config/mpv/script-settings/mpvDLNA.conf
5. Add this line to the mpvDLNA.conf file: python_version=source /home/wayne.config/mpv/env/bin/activate; python3 (remove the 3 if you run python using python instead of python3)

I really haven't tested the method above but I think it theoretically could work. In the long term I am planning to try to remove all of the pip dependencies if I can so this doesn't happen anymore. Hope this helps, let me know if you get any weird errors.

[gitting]

I also wanted to use virtual environment so these suggestions were helpful, thanks!
In the step 5 I had to use the exact path to the venv's python as the combo of two commands didn't work. So it became:

python_version=$myvenv/bin/python

where myvenv is the directory where venv was created.

And that is fine per venv docs

You don’t specifically need to activate a virtual environment, as you can just specify the full path to that environment’s Python interpreter when invoking Python. Furthermore, all scripts installed in the environment should be runnable without activating it.

Also, the upnpclient wants some older version of python than the current 3.14. So the environment needs to be created appropriately. In my case I also had 3.11 and so using the following no subsequent problems were encountered:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.11/bin/python3 -m venv .venv