Sharing media

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols that permits networked devices to seamlessly discover each other’s presence on the network. The perfect thing for sharing media to a range of devices.

On Ubuntu, the application that does this is mediatomb, and it has a large list of features!

In order to get up and running, install it

sudo apt-get install mediatomb

In order to add media, it is done by the web interface. To enable the web interface, modify the file /etc/mediatomb/config.xml and set

• ui enabled="yes"
• accounts enabled="yes"
• Modify the account settings to match the desired username and password
• If you would like the device to appear as something other than MediaTomb, modify nameto something more meaningful
• If planning on sending data to Sony’s Playstation 3, also set protocolInfo extend=yes

Also modify /etc/default/mediatomb and add the appropriate network interface

• INTERFACE="eth0"

Restart mediatomb

sudo restart mediatomb

and navigate to http://localhost:49152

The current display shows the files available in the library (its empty!).

The best way to add files to the library

• Navigate via the Filesystem tab
• Select the folder, eg. External devices will be mounted in /media
• Select  to add the selected folder
• Select Scan Mode, Initial Scan (when importing already existing media), Recursive settings as below

Using the above settings, new media dropped into the directory will be automatically added into the media database.

Once the scan settings have been applied, the web interface could be disabled if there are not going to be any more additions.