I wanted to watch some of the videos that I have on my computer on my playstation 3, so that lead me to search for media server applications. I found out that you could set this up quite easily from within Windows Media Player, however as a linux user I knew there was probably a much better linux based solution available.
After a few minutes of googling, I found a program called Mediatomb. It is avaliable at mediatomb.cc
mediatomb is in the ubuntu repositories, so all that is needed to install it is:
sudo apt-get install mediatomb
All you need to do once it is setup is to open up the config file located at ~/.mediatomb/config.xml
and to add the following below the <server> line
<server>
<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/>
then in the mappings section, add any file formats that you want to be forwarded. In this example .avi and .divx files have been added
<mappings>
<extension-mimetype ignore-unknown=”no”>
<map from=”avi” to=”video/x-divx”/>
<map from=”divx” to=”video/x-divx”/>
Once this is all done, you can run mediatomb, and it will give you an output like the following:
MediaTomb UPnP Server version 0.11.0 – https://mediatomb.cc/
===============================================================================
Copyright 2005-2008 Gena Batsyan, Sergey Bostandzhyan, Leonhard Wimmer.
MediaTomb is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License version 22008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Loading configuration from: /home/mat/.mediatomb/config.xml
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Checking configuration…
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Setting filesystem import charset to UTF-8
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Setting metadata import charset to UTF-8
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Setting playlist charset to UTF-8
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Configuration check succeeded.
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Initialized port: 49152
2008-08-13 23:46:19 INFO: Server bound to: 192.168.0.4
2008-08-13 23:46:20 INFO: MediaTomb Web UI can be reached by following this link:
2008-08-13 23:46:20 INFO: https://192.168.0.4:49152/
The last line shows the information of use, using the ip address you can login to the web interface for the mediatomb server, from there you can add the folders you wish to be shared.
Then on the PS3 or whatever device you are using, you should be able to access the files that you have shared. My PS3 automatically found the server but also had the option to scan for media servers. The only problem with the playstation is that it will refuse to play some files, but most of the videos I tried worked.
Conclusion: Pretty dam cool
The following link is a slightly better guide, than my brief overview https://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/upnp_mediatomb_ps3_and_me
P.S. Media tomb also shares images and music files etc… forgot to mention it.