Jun 29 2009

Success! Now serving media… stage 1

Published by at 15:29:23 under Media Server

It didn’t work at all the last time I tried.

This time I mostly followed some online directions for installing a bare-bones Ubuntu media server running MediaTomb and modified things only slightly to get a result that more closely matched my requirements.

It worked (the third time I tried actually).

I celebrated my success by watching Without a Clue streamed to my PS3 directly from the new media server I had just finished configuring (plus I had time to kill while copying everything over – who knew 100gig took a while to copy).

Instructions are saved for posterity below the cut (more for my reference than yours).

To install webmin in three simple commands enter as root:

wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.470_all.deb

dpkg -i webmin_1.470_all.deb

apt-get install -f

Once all is done, point your browser to https://ip.of.box:10000 and you will be greeted with the webmin console. You can login as root and nose around.

Enough with webmin for now, we’ll revisit that later. As root, on the command line, you will need to install several additional packages. These packages piece together your new server and contain the necessary components to start serving media to your devices across your network.

To install MediaTomb, perform these steps, we’ll worry about configuration later:

As root:
apt-get install mediatomb vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras samba

This command installs the MediaTomb software, VLC, and all the restricted extras that include many codecs for handling various media such as MP3, mpeg, etc. VLC is used by MediaTomb to transcode certain files as necessary on the fly as they are being accessed from your MediaTomb system. Samba makes it possible for you to create an SMB share to a directory which you’ll create to hold all your stuff. On my system, I setup the following directory:

/vol1

To do the same just:
cd /
mkdir vol1 && chmod 777 vol1 && chown uid:gid
(where uid and gid is the name of the user ID and Group ID of a particular user)

If we do an ls command on my vol1 here’s what it looks like:

drwxrwxrwx 6 john john 48 2009-05-25 18:15 vol1

Next, you can use the Samba webmin module to set up read/write access to everyone on the vol1 directory. This lets anyone on your network upload media files to your MediaTomb server. Once the media files are uploaded, you just need to tell MediaTomb where your media is located. This is done via any web browser on the network. Since all my media is in vol1, I have a few directories under vol1:

drwxr-xr-x 21 john john 4096 2009-05-23 17:21 music
drwxr-xr-x 58 john john 4096 2009-05-23 18:28 photographs
drwxr-xr-x 2 john john 16 2009-05-23 16:49 playlists
drwxr-xr-x 3 john john 4096 2009-06-01 18:59 videos

Once I tell MediaTomb that all my media lives under /vol1 recursively, it will then scan that parent location at regular intervals to add new media automatically as you add it later on. You only have to do this part once.

Now let’s get MediaTomb configured so it will be up and running & you can tell it where your media directory is.

The MediaTomb config file is located at:
/etc/mediatomb/config.xml

Search for and make changes to the following lines:


GX50

< !– For PS3 support change to “yes” –>
< !– Uncomment the line below for PS3 divx support –>

< !– Uncomment the line below for D-Link DSM / ZyXEL DMA-1000 –>

When done, save the file. Now restart MediaTomb by issuing the command:
/etc/init.d/mediatomb restart

Once restarted, point your web browser at:

http://ip.of.server:49152

You will see the web based control panel for the MediaTomb engine. Log in with the username and password you set in the config file.

Once logged in, click “Filesystem” at the top left of the window to generate the filesystem view. After you see the filesystem folders, click the parent folder that has all your media goodness in it. In my case it’s /vol1 so I highlighted that. Now in the right pane, click the + symbol with the circling arrows around it (near the top right).

This will tell MediaTomb to regularly rescan and add new media as you add it automatically. Now with all that done, simply copy your media goodness to the SMB share you created and shazam! it appears soon in the index when you browse the server from a PS3 console or other UPnP media playing device.

Here, we show you how the PS3 console browses content stored on your server:

2 responses so far

2 Responses to “Success! Now serving media… stage 1”

  1. # Mattion 29 Jun 2009 at 18:38:39

    Well, golly … that seems simple enough to me! LOL!!

    I suppose the ‘important thing’ is that you actually got that part working … another chapter in the ‘wired home’ … but I’m still not convinced I needed to cable every room in the cottage with CAT5 … yet ;-)

  2. # Mugwugon 03 Jul 2009 at 15:25:38

    Simple my ass. But I really should update this, there have been more than one or two simple tweaks since I first got it running.

    The important stuff is that it runs, automatically starts after a reboot and seems fairly bullet-proof at this point. It’s presently an awesome sandwich filled with extra awesome goodness.

    Can’t wait for the less practical TV-cludge which should be all sorts of fun.

    Yee-Haw!

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