Streaming media

Businesses are storing their data on the network for ages now, but the past few years, there has been a trend in home networking to put all content on a central server and distributing it to the home computers and dedicated appliances on the network. This page offers an overview of the possible packages to stream digital media (video, audio and images, and in several cases also online content) from your server to your clients.

Serverside

Network configuration

Your server should be set up to use multicasting. This will ensure that your clients will always find the server automatically on the network:

• Setting it up manually in /etc/rc.conf:

ROUTES=(!gateway multicast)
gateway=""
multicast="-net 239.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 eth0"

• Using avahi and mdns

Media Servers list

There are many uPNP or DLNA-compliant server and you can use Mpd too. Some of the them do not get along together. If you are experiencing problems, make sure you are not running two of them at the same time.

• MediaTomb
• Minidlna
• Fuppes
• uShare
• Coherence - Fairly new server, implemented in Python. Should be handling transcoding in the svn-version. Looked very promising, but development seems to have stalled somehow.
• PS3 Mediaserver
• Universal Media Server - A DLNA-compliant UPnP Media Server
• Rygel
• Mpd

Clientside

The VLC media player includes a Universal Plug'n'Play module and can browse and play from a server.