I tried using another DHCP server (udhcpd), but that won't even boot up, with rioplay, rrr, or the original client. I see with arpwatch that the receiver defaults to 169.254.103.208, it doesn't get the lease.

Unfortunately, my dhcp server is a different machine than my JRec server. I tweeked the dhcpd daemon as much as I could to coax the clients into thinking it the DHCP lease came from the same machine as JRec, but to no avail. To put the DHCP server on the same JRec server would require a kernel recompile and reboot, neither of which I really want to do as of yet. (Or use udhcpd, which doesn't seem to work at all for me).

If this matters much, Reza's rrr has similar behavior, so I'd probably attribute its issue to the dhcp stuff as well. It initializes the LCD, but thats it. No button presses do anything.