Aehso’s Output

N800 and UPnP MediaServers for Mac OS X?

Canola and the Media Streamer on the N800 are apparently both capable UPnP control points/players so I recently decided to set up a UPnP MediaServer on my Mac Mini, where all my media(photos/music/video) lives. I drew a blank though:

• MediaTomb - open source but I couldn’t find a universal binary anywhere.
• EyeConnect - the N800 could see the server, it did not list any available media content.
• TwonkyVision - music and photo streaming worked but I had no luck with streaming video and then the trial expired. It’s hard to justify buying commercial software when a major feature doesn’t appear to work in my environment.

Today, I notice the PS3 modders also have a list of UPnP Servers but alas nothing new there either.

Maybe I’ll have a go at building MediaTomb on OS X or maybe I’ll have to install Linux on my Mac Mini?

Update: I took the plunge and compiled and installed MediaTomb on my Mac Mini (using Apple Xcode development tools) following the instructions. There is a bit of prep work required to install the prerequisite zlib, libmagic, libjs, taglib, id3lib, libexif libraries though so this approach is not for the faint-hearted! I did hit a minor snag getting the MediaTomb configure script to use libjs v1.6 but resolved that with a little help from Jin. Streaming music and photos works great with Canola but some streamed DIVX-encoded AVI files won’t play - I’m assuming that is an N800 codec problem though…

Update 2: A day later, Jin announces that MediaTomb is now available via Fink. That should makes it easier for the rest of you to compile/install. Thanks Jin!