Serving from Windows is ludicrously simple using Windows Media Player 11 or TVersity, but I have a small, super-old-school Linux file server used for backups-and-such and I wanted to use it to serve media.  Turns out to be very simple to do so.

MythTV is the big guy in this space, but it had a number of issues for me:

• Not particularly straightforward to set up (considering the very simple use case I had for it).
• Tons of functionality that I didn’t need, including a heavy front-end app (though there is a lighter weight web app I could have installed).
• I couldn’t figure out how to get it to serve WMAs and, since I’ve ripped a bunch of CDs to WMA, this was a killer.

None of this is to say that MythTV is not a great piece of software; it was just way more than I needed.

GMediaServer is a GNU uPNP media server and it looked pretty good, but I wasn’t sure that it would serve video.  Documentation is a also bit lacking.

Enter MediaTomb.  Simple, lightweight, basic media serving.  “apt-get install mediatomb” and I was pretty much there.  A slight, very well documented modification to the configuration file and I popped open a web browser, browsed to the built-in web interface and told MediaTomb to server my /share/media directory.  Walked over to my PS3 (on which the MediaTomb server was already listed) and started browsing my media files.

The only issue I had was when I updated the media files on the server.  Sometimes MediaTomb wouldn’t see the modifications and would send to the PS3 out-of-date data, probably because I was using inotify rather than just time-based refresh.  I switched to the time-based refresh and deleted the MediaTomb SQLite database and all was right with the world.

Useful links:

• http://www.mediatomb.cc
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=650020
• http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/upnp_mediatomb_ps3_and_me