PS3 Media Servers

Now that UShare is no longer supported and also not working with the newest version of Ubuntu or Fedora, I needed to find a solution for my media streaming needs. I found a great server called MediaTomb.

MediaTomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.

MediaTomb implements the UPnP MediaServer V 1.0 specification that can be found on http://www.upnp.org/. The current
implementation focuses on parts that are required by the specification, however we look into extending the functionality to cover the optional parts of the spec as well.

Currently Supported Features

• browse and playback your media via UPnP
• metadata extraction from mp3, ogg, flac, jpeg, etc. files.
• Exif thumbnail support
• user defined server layout based on extracted metadata (scriptable virtual containers)
• automatic directory rescans
• highly flexible media format transcoding via plugins / scripts
• sophisticated web UI with a tree view of the database and the file system, allowing to add/remove/edit/browse your media
• support for external URLs (create links to internet content and serve them via UPnP to your renderer)
• support for ContentDirectoryService container updates
• Active Items (experimental feature), allows execution of server side scripts upon HTTP GET requests to certain items
• highly flexible configuration, allowing you to control the behavior of various features of the server
• support for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X
• runs on x86, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, Sparc

Installation on Fedora:

yum install mediatomb

If you want to run MediaTomb as a service, edit the /etc /mediatomb.conf file and choose a network interface. Afterwards start the server using the folowing command:

service mediatomb start

Use either the ntsysv or the graphical system-config-services utility to enable the mediatomb service startup at boot time.

Installation on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

There are basically two ways of starting MediaTomb: you can either start it directly as a normal user or run it as a deamon. For the latter you’ll need the “mediatomb-daemon” package. A “mediatomb” user and group will be added automatically. You’ll find the configuration under / etc/mediatomb/config.xml, the logfile under /var/log/mediatomb and the database under/var/lib/mediatomb/. If you want MediaTomb to be started at boot time, change the NO_START option from "yes" to "" in the file / etc/default/mediatomb. To access the UI of the MediaTomb daemon open the your browser and go to http://localhost:49152.

I had my system up and running in minutes.