Mediatomb 0.12 – Streaming audio and video around the house
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 PS3 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 have kept notes on how I setup Mediatomb 0.11 and Mediatomb 0.12 on my DLNA wiki page.
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 abaility to scrobble your music to Last.fm, this a killer feature for me and why I choose 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. 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 create a script which queries IMDB to categorises 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. If you have any cool import hacks for Mediatomb then I am all ears
In: Audio & Video · Tagged with: DLNA, Linux, Mediatomb, PS3
on February 7, 2009 at 7:32 pm
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Martin, I’d be interested to hear what your settings are for ps3 mp4 files. The preset one with my handbrake doesn’t seem compatible with the ps3. Not sure why.
on February 10, 2009 at 11:51 am
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OK, no problem. I will post my Handbrake settings later.
However, this may be helpful to you. I previously used Handbrake 0.92 (which was CLI only) and it had a bug where some PAL DVDs ripped to MP4 using the PS3 preset would not playback the video, you only heard the audio with a black screen. I believe this was is a mod16 issue, but the posts from developers in the Handbrake forums refute this. What compatibility problems do you have exactly?
In any case, I have had no such problem using Handbrake 0.93 via the new GUI. The PS3 preset that comes with Handbrake does work, I just wanted to tweak the quality options slightly in my custom PS3 preset.
on March 16, 2009 at 2:05 pm
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Hi Martin – thanks for the excellent tutorial on installing Mediatomb 0.12. It was working great for me until just recently. I think some updates have slipped in to my Ubuntu 8.04 and now Mediatomb cannot find the library libavformat.so.52 and fails to start.
Any tips on how to get this library back? Looking in my package mgr and the closest I can find is /usr/lib/libavformat.so.1d. Sorry to bug you but I’m having a hard time trying to find where it’s gone!
Thanks again for the great wiki.
on March 31, 2009 at 7:15 am
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I would be very interested in your imdb script. We currently store our movies (about 1500 of them now) in individual subdirectories.
We have been trying to decide whether to create a whole new directory tree of symlinks with the info from imdb or just modify the import.js file to create it virtually. Since we have people using old xbox’s with xbmc to connect over smb as well as people with ps3′s using mediatomb, the symlink tree is our preferred solution.
What is your script for grabbing the info from imdb?
on April 15, 2009 at 4:23 pm
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@Andy: Sorry to hear you are having problems. My only suggestion is to add the Medibuntu repository to your Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 system and the re-install ffmpeg. Medibuntu has an unstripped version of ffmpeg in their repository for Hardy and this may clear up your problem.
@Sameer: I’ll be posting more details about my IMDB script in the next few days
on April 19, 2009 at 4:09 am
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You’re notes on how to install MediaTomb 0.12.0 have been a huge help… thought I’d point out a few issues I ran into, as of 4/18/2009 on an Ubuntu Hardy server:
1) ffmpeg SVN doesn’t take the following configure options anymore: “–enable-swscale” and “–enable-xvmc”. swscale is now enabled by default, don’t know about xvmc.
2) ffmpegthumbnailer-1.4.0 doesn’t work with the latest ffmpeg SVN. I had to build the ffmpegthumbnailer SVN (http://code.google.com/p/ffmpegthumbnailer/source/browse/wiki/BuildingFromSubversion.wiki)
3) ffmpegthumbnailer required installation of libjpeg62-dev, which I didn’t have.
4) New version of lastfmlib (0.2.0) was available, so I used that instead
5) lastfmlib required installation of libcurl4-openssl-dev. Your instructions install this lib in the following step.
MediaTomb is now compiling, so I imagine the rest of the configuration should be straight forward. Thanks for your help!
on April 22, 2009 at 8:20 am
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@sdub: Thanks very much for the update. I haven’t recompiled Mediatomb since I wrote the article but when I next upgrade I will incorporate your amendments.
@Adam C: I have finally got round to documenting my Handbrake presets for the PS3. You can find details on my DVD Ripping wiki page.
http://wiki.flexion.org/DVDRipping.html
on April 22, 2009 at 11:11 am
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@Sameer: I’ve uploaded my IMDB script, I’ll add a specific post about it soon but for now see the Code section of my site.
http://code.flexion.org/
on April 22, 2009 at 1:24 pm
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@sdub: Thanks again for posting the updates for building Mediatomb. I’ve run through a new Mediatomb build and incorporated your changes in the wiki page
http://wiki.flexion.org/InstallingMediaTomb012.html
on April 30, 2009 at 8:29 pm
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Hello,
thx for your howto looks great.
I am encountering some problems. Tried to install on Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop x64. ffmpeg failed to install.
So I completely reinstalled. This time Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop x64.
However I ran into the same problem. Tried various things with any help.
I followed exactly your howto, also tried others (always with a fresh install to be sure)
ffmpeg quits while compiling with this error. configure runs fine. I didn’t had any errors before.
/usr/bin/ld: /usr/local/lib/libx264.a(common.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol’ can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/usr/local/lib/libx264.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: ld gab 1 als Ende-Status zurück
make: *** [libavcodec/libavcodec.so.52] Fehler 1
Trying installing it since 2 days. 30.04.09
Also tried to install libavcodec and the dev. WIthout any positive results.
Is this an issue of an svn source? Problems with the AMD64 architecture? Do you run AMD64?
Maybe you have a solution or a hint for me….
thx in advance.
greets
on April 30, 2009 at 11:53 pm
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Hello again,
I removed the –enable-libnut option for configure in ffmpeg. make & install run fine for ffmpeg. ffmpeg -formats show a lot of codecs.
what does libnut exactly do?
for running autogen.sh in ffmpegthumbnailer I needed automake and libtool.
installed with mysql support. apt-get install mysqlclient mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev
also enabled podcast and weborama. dont know what it is but enabled it anyway.
./configure –prefix=/usr/local –enable-weborama –enable-sopcast –enable-mysql
installed medtiaomb with checksinstall -y
configured config as described. encountering problems when adding mkv files to DB. mediatomb crashes with segmentation fault.
need to test more though. divx/m2ts seem to work.
on May 1, 2009 at 7:11 am
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@Cem: libnut is another container format for audio and video files, I haven’t seen it used widely myself so probably no great loss
Thanks for the tips about enabling MySQL and other features.
on May 4, 2009 at 8:12 pm
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Hello again,
I had an issue with mkv Files. Revision 2018 of mediatomb.
I wasn’t able importing mkv Files into database. Mediatomb crashed. I now compiled mediatomb without taglib “–disable-taglib”.
After doing so I can insert mkv Files into Database without any problems. Haven’t checked so far if the problem is caused from mediatomb or taglib.
Found this in the help section of the mediatomb HP. Someone else had a similar problem.
on October 6, 2009 at 5:52 am
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Hey Martin,
thanks for the wonderfull blogs. It helped me getting everything up the right way. Now the only problem is I get some stutter in my MKV playback. I have everything wired by LAN, the regular avi’s stream just fine, but the transcoding MKV’s are really hard to deal with for the PS3.. I was curious what kind of hardware you guys here are using for this job. I have an older 2,3Ghz Celeron with 512MB memory.
on October 17, 2009 at 11:49 am
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I have a big workstation
http://wiki.flexion.org/DellT7400Workstation.html
But I am running my Mediatomb server in a VirtualBox virtual server which is allocated a single CPU core from the host and 1GB of RAM.
That said, I don’t not transcode MKV on the fly. I have created two scripts to convert MKV (with little or no re-encoding) to MPEG-4 or M2TS which the PS3 can stream without transcoding.
I recommend the M2TS conversion script.
http://code.flexion.org/MKV-to-M2TS.html
http://code.flexion.org/MKV-to-MP4.html
on April 26, 2010 at 12:32 am
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Hi Martin
When trying to apply the lasftfm-patch, I get the following failed hunks:
patching file src/config_manager.cc
Hunk #1 FAILED at 628.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 2216 (offset 209 lines).
1 out of 2 hunks FAILED — saving rejects to file src/config_manager.cc.rej
patching file src/server.cc
Hunk #1 succeeded at 41 with fuzz 1 (offset 4 lines).
Hunk #2 succeeded at 112 with fuzz 2 (offset 8 lines).
Hunk #3 succeeded at 350 (offset 8 lines).
patching file src/lastfm.h
patching file src/common.h
Hunk #1 succeeded at 375 with fuzz 2 (offset 23 lines).
patching file src/config_manager.h
Hunk #1 succeeded at 195 (offset 8 lines).
patching file src/file_request_handler.cc
Hunk #2 succeeded at 460 (offset 4 lines).
patching file src/lastfm.cc
patching file build/libmediatomb_src
Hunk #1 succeeded at 69 (offset 2 lines).
patching file build/Makefile.am
Hunk #1 FAILED at 27.
Hunk #2 FAILED at 54.
Hunk #3 FAILED at 93.
3 out of 3 hunks FAILED — saving rejects to file build/Makefile.am.rej
patching file configure.ac
Hunk #1 succeeded at 1621 with fuzz 2 (offset 52 lines).
Hunk #2 FAILED at 1957.
1 out of 2 hunks FAILED — saving rejects to file configure.ac.rej
Can you help me out, please?
Thanks
Tom