Streaming Media Content to a Sony Playstation 3 from a Linux Desktop
The "Find Media Server" menu items on my Playstation's XMB (XrossMediaBar) have been teasing my curiosity lately. I have a fairly large repository of media available on my desktop computer... about 20 GB of family pictures, 16 GB of music ripped from my less-than-impressive CD library, and a handful of DVDs encoded to DivX (for my own personal purpose of creating a backup copy of course!). So it would sure me nice to access that content on my PS3 over my home network now wouldn't it?!

One possible problem... my music and my videos are located on my desktop computer running (Ubuntu) Linux, and my pictures are located on my home file server running FreeBSD (NFS-mounted on my desktop). I can access this media on other (less reliable) platforms using SMB shares, but accessing SMB shares is not supported by the PS3. Drat. (Actually not supporting SMB shares is probably a good thing... it is a messy ugly protocol.)

Enter MediaTomb, a free open source (GPL) UPnP media server that supports a variety of UPnP compatible devices... including the Sony PS3. MediaTomb runs on a variety of platforms, most notably Debian and Ubuntu. Seems like a perfect fit!

Download and installation of mediatomb was pretty easy. I just added the appropriate deb line ("deb http://apt.mediatomb.cc/ gutsy main") to my sources.list and then installed it via Ubuntu's "Add/Remove..." GUI interface. I had to modify one line of the config file to add support for the PS3 (I did this according to the instructions found in mediatomb's on-line documentation). Once installed and configured, I started the mediatomb server by simply typing the command "mediatomb &" at a command prompt. This launched the media server... and it was running in the background listening for connections.

To add content to the server, access mediatomb's web interface available on port 49152. There is a handy menu item Ubuntu automagically installs in the "Applications -> Sound & Video" menu that can be used for this purpose... or just type "http://127.0.0.1:49152/" into the address bar of a web browser and create a bookmark in your browser for future easy access.

Adding media content to the mediatomb server is an easy point/click process... as easy as surfing around any web site on the net. Nice and simple. I added my mp3 albums directory, some photo albums, and a couple of DivX movies. I then went upstairs, fired up the PS3, and clicked on the "Find Media Server..." menu item. After about a 10 second search it found the server and all of the content. The MP3 music, JPG photos, and DivX videos all appeared under the "MediaTomb" media server in the Photo, Music, and Video menus (respectively) on my PS3... and stream over the (wired) home network on command. Sure, the DivX movies are pretty blocky on such a large screen (1080 lines of resolution on the TV compared to about, oh, 300 or so on most of the DivX movies)... but it's still a pretty darn cool trick! Thanks mediatomb (and Sony)!