Sharing media
I’ve got a large collection of MP3s on one of my Linux boxes at home and I wanted to be able to share that with my home entertainment system.
Networking
First item to deal with was networking. I recently bought a Linksys WRT54GL router and flashed it with DD-WRT v24. This allowed me to use the router as a wireless bridge to my local network.
My other router, a Linksys WRT350N was already running DD-WRT. Only issue I had was that I couldn’t get any wireless security to work. In the end, I just enabled MAC filtering. Hopefully this gets resolved by a DD-WRT update in the future.
Once the bridge was established, I could connect my Pioneer BDP-95FD Blu-ray player on to the network. I configured it with a static address in the initial setup screen. I was able to ping the player from my other machines and the player was able go on the Internet and download/install the latest firmware.
I was only able to use one device on the bridge though because everything behind it was being masked with the same MAC address. Seems to be a limitation of the bridge itself.
Sharing
My Blu-ray player supports Windows Media Connect and DLNA for media sharing on a network.
Windows Media
Using KVM I loaded a Windows XP Professional virtual machine and installed the Windows Media Connect software on it. It was easy to setup. I told it what I wanted to share, what devices to authorize and started the service.
I turned on the player and it saw the sample photos and sample MP3s on the VM. It didn’t however see my collection. It doesn’t seem to be able to share a mapped network drive. I tried messing with Samba on the Linux box to allow anonymous access, but no go.
Nothing I tried worked expect using the local storage in the VM. I didn’t want to have to copy GBs of MP3s into the VM though. I also didn’t want to have to depend on Windows if I could help it.
DLNA
I found uShare which is a free UPnP A/V & DLNA Media Server for Linux. I’d seen Ubuntu users talking about how they had used this to share media on their XBox’s and PS3’s.
I found an ebuild for Gentoo and installed it on the server that held the MP3 collection.
When I turned on the player, at first it didn’t see anything when I used the DLNA profile in ushare. I switched to the XBox profile but then it said it wasn’t authorized. I didn’t see any way to fix that.
After some more debugging I found that the DLNA profile was the correct one to use. The player could see and use the service. The command line I use to run it as:
ushare -n server_name -i eth0 -c /data/mp3s -D
To debug problems I use:
ushare -n server_name -i eth0 -c /data/mp3s -d -v
Final thoughts
uShare works good and gives me a Linux based DLNA solution. I can run it on my server in the background and it’s always available to the player. If I had to use Windows, I’d need to keep a VM running and duplicate copies of my stuff.
Hopefully in future uShare versions they will improve support for bigger libraries and provide more metadata. I found that Windows Connect would show album covers and read the ID tags off the MP3s. DNLA was more like a file browser.