Mediatomb on Wimpy's World

Mediatomb vs. MiniDLNA

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:34:12 +0000

I’ve been using Mediatomb for nearly two years now but decided to give MiniDLNA a whirl since it is a fully fledged DLNA server whereas Mediatomb is UPnP only. I’m currently running both Mediatomb SVN and MiniDLNA CVS. So, how does MiniDLNA compare to Mediatomb?

MiniDLNA is easier to compile, configure, uses less RAM and has less software dependencies than Mediatomb.
MiniDLNA doesn’t currently support music play lists or Last.fm scrobbling. Mediatomb supports .m3u and .pls playlists but requires a 3rd party patch to add Last.fm scrobbling.
MiniDLNA doesn’t support dynamic video thumbnail creation, which would be nice to have but is not essential, cover images are supported. Mediatomb supports video thumbnails via ffmpegthumbnailer.
MiniDLNA doesn’t currently have any transcoding support. This is of little consequence for me since I import video content into my library in a format natively supported by the PS3, either MP3, MPEG-2 TS or MPEG-4. Mediatomb does support transcoding but it is somewhat fiddly to setup and you can’t pause transcoded content.
MiniDLNA works “out of the box” with the PS3 (and other DLNA clients) while Mediatomb requires some tweaking.
Mediatomb’s default video import script doesn’t suit how I organise my video library, but MiniDLNA suits my video library perfectly.

So, as of today I am running both Mediatomb and MiniDLNA. Mediatomb is exclusively handling audio since playlist and Last.fm support are essential for me. MiniDLNA is now handling video exclusively. I’m very happy with the results but should MiniDLNA add .m3u/.pls play lists and Last.fm support I will switch everything to MiniDLNA.

2 years later…

Since writing this post MiniDLNA added support for playlists. It still doesn’t support Last.fm scrobbling though. Despite that I switched to MiniDLNA and it has been streaming audio and video around the house for that last couple of years.

PS3, Mediatomb, Multi Zone Music streaming

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:02:52 +0000

PlayStation 3 firmware 3.00 added a new feature I was very excited about, multi-av output. Today I finally got round to re-wiring the home cinema system to make use of this new feature. I now have the PS3 streaming music from MediaTomb with my A/V receiver sending audio to Zone 1 via digital inter connects and also sending audio to Zone 2 via analog stereo interconnects.

Zone 1 is a 5.1 speaker setup and Zone 2 is a 2.0 all weather wireless speaker system which are often in the kitchen but also moved outside for parties. If Sony could just add Skype to the PS3 and allow the PSP Remote Play to output audio to both the PS3 and PSP (rather than just one of them) I would be very happy indeed.

Mediatomb 0.12 - Streaming audio and video around the house

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:23:39 +0000

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, such as the PlayStation in my case.

Mediatomb 0.12 is not yet released as final yet but it is certainly stable enough for general use, so I spent the last week migrating from Mediatomb 0.11 to Mediatomb 0.12.

I’ve recently finished ripping my entire CD collection (344 CDs) to MP3 and I am currently ripping my DVD collection (85 done so far) to MP4 with AAC 5.1 audio. The ‘Music’ and ‘Video’ folders in our home directories are mounted via NFS. The Mediatomb server uses the same data sources so any playlists or new music/videos we might import are immediately reflected in Mediatomb.

Our entire CD library is now available at the click of a button, automatically organised by genre, artist and date. We have also created some playlists in .m3u or .pls format.

New to Mediatomb 0.12 is the ability to scrobble your music to Last.fm, this a killer feature for me and why I chose to migrate to 0.12 before it goes final.

I ripped the CDs using SoundJuicer, since I can configure it to use LAME presets. I then used the Music Brainz Picard Tagger to add additional tagging and embed cover art and then applied ReplayGain.

Finally my wife and I use Banshee to manage the music library on our computers, including the creation of playlists and syncing to our iPods.

I am using Handbrake to rip the DVDs to MP4. I’ve created a new PS3 compatible profile which is focused on quality, I’ll post details about that in the future. Mediatomb 0.12 has some experimental features to stream video content from .ISO images of DVDs. I’ve yet to play with that but it sounds very cool. I’ve also created a script which queries IMDB to categorise our film library by genre and create summary information about each film in the library. I’ll be posting more about that soon. I haven’t finalised how we will integrate Photo management with Mediatomb yet, but that is that final piece in the puzzle.