Creating a Media Server

Overall Motivation

With multiple PCs, it’d be nice to be able to access my music and movies on all of them - for both myself and the family.

High Level Requirements

  • Music must be accessible within a web interface over the internet
  • Music must be accessible through ITunes
  • Music must be accessible over the Xbox 360
  • Videos must be accessible over the Xbox 360
  • Photos must be accessible over the Xbox 360
  • Access to all services must be easy (as I’d expect my family to be able to do it without computer knowledge)

Implementation

Accessing music over a web interface

There are several packages that support this:

  • “Ampache”:http://www.ampache.org/
  • “Jinzora”:http://en.jinzora.com/
  • “MediaHive”:http://www.mhive.org/
  • “MP3Act”:http://www.mp3act.net/

The typical case for use would be someone accessing the server through their web browser, logging in, selecting which songs they want to play and pressing play. The music should then be played through their browser. Considering the size of my mp3 collection, the catalogue presented to the user would have to be easy to browse.

Ampache was the only one of the four I could get to work with any amount of ease. It does exactly what I want though does suffer the problem that there is a (slight) amount of manual administration for clients as the browser pop-up blocker needs to be disabled for the site. Seeing as it’s a one-off for any new computer, I can live with it.

Streaming to the Xbox

The Xbox 360 can pull media off of servers via a protocol called UPnP Media (part of the UPnP suite that has firewall configuration as part of its remit). The three main UPnP Media servers that filled my Google search window were

Twonky is right out (not free), leaving two. UShare seemed easy to set up but I couldn’t actually get my Xbox to play any hosted music. I don’t know if this is a bug in uShare, a problem with my configuration or the fact that my files were hosted on a NAS; but it’s very annoying.