uPnP?

The BBS2 has a large store of music, pictures and will eventually also have some video on it. There are plenty of ways of accessing it via a computer, but I wanted a solution that would allow other devices to also access it. Given the huge amount of media coverage and use in advertising I figured that using a uPnP server would be the easiest way.

Finding a uPnP server to install wasn’t hard, but finding one that worked with the various clients and devices proved harder.

uShare
This installed easily and was very lightweight. It provided easy access, but quite a few clients didn’t work with it. Coupled with the fact that the project seems dead I decided it wasn’t worth too much effort.

MediaTomb
This seemed more promising and seemed to work better at first, but once again several clients had issues with it. After using it for a while I decided that it wasn’t for me.

fuppes
I looked at fuppes quite early on in my serach, but it appeared to be a dead project. Then I stumbled across this thread which gave me pause and encouraged me to try it. Following the instructions and some extra details on the original wiki it didn’t take long to build and install and once configured worked straight away.

The project is similar to a lot of open source projects, but the directions that the current active developers intend to take it seem like good ones and as it already works I’m using it for serving the media at home.

For more on the new development there’s a blog