Old post detected!
This post is roughly 15 years old; originally published on February 7, 2009! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
Please read this page but do keep its age in mind.
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.