thechangelab.com

Useful Software: the Streaming Server

If your’re like me, you’ve got a large collection of media. Some of it on disc. Some of it tucked away as bits on a hard drive. Dealing with a bunch of discs can be easy compared to several gig of music files. That’s unless if you’ve got walls of shelves devoted to CDs like a friend of mine. There are services that will rip your CDs and put them on DVD, etc., for you. But what about what you’ve already got on your hard drive? This is when having a streaming media server can be quite useful. Think of easy access to your stuff, maybe even over the Internet.

But what if you don’t have a new machine powerful enough to stream your stuff. Fear not, and welcome to the world of GNU software.

Whether it’s Linux, OS X, BSD, Solaris, or even Windows (with some limitations), try Steve’s gnump3d. An extremely light weight – CPU usage wise – server, specifically meant to stream MP3 and OGG files. Once installed and configured, just point a web browser to http://hostname:8888 You’ll get a simple web interface to your music. You don’t even need to have a web server like Apache installed.
Some of the things it can do for you:

• stream video (avi, mpeg, wmv and mov)
• downsample
• search and browse by directory
• option to download vs. stream
• view stats about your music/videos
• change and sort order
• random playlists

The last feature is great for when you don’t have time to browse through a thousand songs and decide which ones you want to hear.

As a plus, if you’re a developer, you can write your own theme and plugins. (The software is written in Perl.) For example, the search function itself is a plugin. On Linux, you can run it from the command line in debug mode, instead of daemon mode.

How light weight is it though? Here at thechangelab, on a PIII 450MHz with 256MB RAM and IDE hard drives, it indexed over 14 GB of files in less than a minute. On the same machine while running KDE, Ktorrent, Firefox, Quanta and Skype on Slackware, it doesn’t miss a beat in its streaming.

My only bitch about the current version is that, there seems to be a problem with how it handles movie files. The link to stream the video comes out incorrectly. Re-writing the URL in the browser’s address bar fixes it though. There are also some file permissions issues. No problem for us Unix users, but can be a hassle for Windows. This problem isn’t present if you install the Debian stable package. To get more info. about the Debian package and config you can go here.

So why not take that ancient PC out of the garage and put a free OS on it. At the same time, it’ll probably need a new hard drive to hold all your music.

– toshiya