Playstation 3 Media Server on Gentoo
2009-01-01 12:18 - Tech
As I said recently, I've just gotten an Playstation 3. It's not only a gaming console, but also a respectable home theater component. I've got archives of various material that I would burn to DVD-RW disks, to watch in my DivX capable DVD box. Things are even easier now, the PS3 will play them directly over the network (from my already always-on linux server).
I googled a while, to find various possible solutions. The programs ushare and fuppes are mentioned quite often. Unfortunately, neither of them compile easily with portage, even after manually adding ebuilds to a local overlay, or adding the sunrise overlay. Continuing my search, I found a forum post which recommended MediaTomb, which is in portage, and compiles with no trouble. I found a guide to make MediaTomb work well with the PS3, and some further tweaks in their documentation, and voila! Video streaming straight from my server to my big TV, in wonderful quality.
It's got a simple daemon, which serves the videos over UPnP, and a straightforward web interface for controlling it with. I'd recommend MediaTomb to anyone with a PS3 and a Gentoo server.
2009-01-01 18:49 - arantius
As always, the Gentoo Wiki has lots of great info on setting up MediaTomb on Gentoo, like getting thumbnails to work, and transcoding. Just found it, and I'm happy to have done so.