Aron's Tech Blog

I bought a new 4 bedroom house that has 2 living room back in September and I’m just now getting around to furnishing it.  The one thing I got was a new Toshiba TV.  I noticed that you could plug a USB flash drive into it and so I put one in and launch the media player on the TV and was shocked to see my tablet on there.  After some investigating these new TV’s are UPnP aware and have a media player that can play from a UPnP server.  Turns out it’s incredibly easy to do this on FC16 using MediaTomb as the server.  Let me relay the steps to doing this.

1. In this case I’m using FC16 stock install with MySQL installed, let me point out it’s the default MySQL install, see the post on starting MySQL to hear about that nightmare, this is the reason that I had to do that.
2. Instal MediaTomb by typing ‘yum install mediatomb’.  This will also create the mediatomb user in the system that the service will use to run as (although not the home directory which is a great place to house the media, more later on this point).
3. You’ll have to create a new MySQL database, this should be second nature but if not here is a link to the documentation on it.
4. Now you’ll have to edit the mediatomb.conf which is located /etc/mediatomb.conf directory.  It’s nice and easy as the only thing you really need to do is bind it to an interface with the MT_INTERFACE =”[interface]”.  To find what you need to put in here, do an ifconfig and put in whatever is the active network connection is.  Oh make note of the MT_PORT number while you are here.
5. Now we are ready to start the service, done by typing ‘service mediatomb start’ into BASH.  By extension stop, restart and status work too.
6. You are up and running and from the server type in the following in for the URL:  http://localhost:[MT_PORT] where the port is what you made note of in the mediatomb.conf in step 4.
7. You can now use the UI (user interface) to add directories to the server.

I would be derelict in my reporting without telling you the last steps but at this point the server is up and running so here is the rest of the story.

You’ll need to get the media over there.  I’d recommend FTP (see related post).  And you’ll need a directory to store this media.  What I did was create a /home/mediatomb and then uploaded the media via FTP.  Just chown the media to mediatomb and place it in this directory and then using the user interface specify /home/mediatomb as the directory to check, do so recrusive and I’m using the timed (I’ve heard bad things about Inotify and MP3’s set to full and recursive.  I didn’t include hidden anything and left the scan interval at 30 minutes (1800 seconds).

That’s it, you’re done.  I put about 110Gb of music into the directory and it took about 3 or 4 hours to move, and it’s now in the process of scanning them in no apparent order.  I’m not sure how long it will take but will try to update if I can figure it out.  But if you’re anything like me it’s time to go make a drink and I’ll check back on it tomorrow when I can almost guarantee that it’ll be done:)  Okay here is the update, takes about as long as it does to transfer as it does to index.