Linux: TwonkyMedia Server Licensing Problem Workaround

The system I use at home consists basically of my shuttle server sitting in the cupboard streaming to my XBox360 so that I get HD and upscaling. I’ve tried a few different UPnP media streaming apps and while I’m sure a lot of them are great, I just didn’t have the time to fiddle about constantly and the one which worked out of the box first was the TwonkyMedia trial so I was sold on the convenience.

The problems began after the trial had run out and I purchased the product – the license key didn’t seem to want to play ball. The result of this was a back-and-forth with support while the whole time there were no films or TV to be had so a workaround was needed.

After doing a little research, I found a file in the /bin directory called “.tv5”  and checked the content:

root@merlin:~# find / -name .tv*
/bin/.tv5
root@merlin:~# cat /bin/.tv5
upnp av.xml

Strangely enough, it was created on the very date I installed the trial! And indeed, stopping the twonkymedia daemon, removing this file and restarting the daemon allowed me to carry on in trial mode whilst the licensing was sorted with support. And very helpful they were too >:)

root@merlin:~# ps aux | grep -i twonky
root       957  0.0  0.0   1884   268 ?        S<   Sep01   0:00 /usr/local/twonky/twonkymedia
root       958  0.1  0.3   8068  2432 ?        S<l  Sep01  38:32 /usr/local/twonky/twonkymediaserver
root      3410  0.0  0.1   3340   884 pts/2    S<+  20:38   0:00 grep -i twonky
root@merlin:~# kill 958
root@merlin:~# rm /bin/.tv5
root@merlin:~# /usr/local/twonky/twonkymedia
twonkymedia        twonkymediaserver  twonkymedia.sh
root@merlin:~# /usr/local/twonky/twonkymedia
TwonkyMedia Version 5.0.61
using logfile /tmp/TwonkyMediaServer-log.txt