MediaTomb

FAQ

General

My UPnP player can not see MediaTomb, what is wrong?

Network related problems can be difficult to track, here are some most frequently encountered cases:

  • make sure that both, the player and the server are on the same subnet, otherwise UPnP will not work
  • check if you can ping the player from the server, if this is not possible then you have some general network issue
  • if you have several network interfaces, check that MediaTomb is running on the correct one (you can set the default interface in config.xml)
  • make sure that your firewall is not blocking the server, port 1900 has to be open as well as the port on which the server is running (i.e. web UI port), both TCP and UDP

Why is the port of the web UI changing when I restart the server?

If the port was not specified on command line or in the configuration, MediaTomb will choose the first available port, starting from 49152. When you shutdown the server the port may still be claimed by the system for a short amount of time, thus if you restart MediaTomb we will request port 49152, get back the information that it is not yet available, so the UPnP SDK will automatically try the next port until it finds a free one.

You can however specify a fixed port for the server, in this case we will apply a special reuse option to the socket and we will always listen on the specified port. This can be done by setting <port>number</port> the config.xml

Player Quirks

My player wants a non-standard mimetype for my content, how do I change it?

Add a custom extension to mimetype mapping in config.xml.

For example, if you want that all .avi files get the video/x-divx mimetype, use the following mapping:

<map from=“avi” to=“video/divx”/>

The mapping is only triggered when the data is being imported, the setting will not affect content that is already in the database. If you want to update previously imported files you will have to reimport them: remove from the database and add them again.

Scripting

I modified the import.js script, but I see no changes when importing data, what's wrong?

You probably forgot to change the virtual layout type from builtin to js in config.xml:

<virtual-layout type=“js”>

Also, make sure the line:

<import-script>/etc/mediatomb/import.js</import-script>

Points to the correct location where your import.js resides.

Debugging

How do I check what XML is offered to the UPnP devices?

Get the Cidero control point from http://www.cidero.com (free download), run the MediaController application. Open the debug window: Options→Debug Window…

In the main window click on the MediaTomb icon, you will be presented with the content (i.e. with the content layout which you can also see on your UPnP device). Each time you click on a container in the tree you will see a “MediaTomb: Browse Status: OK” entry in the debug window. Click on this line in the Debug Window and you will see the XML of the browse response below.

Jin asked me for a wireshark capture, what do I do?

First of all, make sure that you make the capture on the machine where your MediaTomb server is running. Download and install wireshark on that machine, start wireshark. Make sure to select the correct network interface for the capture - it must be the interface on which MediaTomb is running. Start the capture, start MediaTomb, then start your UPnP player. Reproduce the problem which you are debugging, then stop the capture and save it in pcap format.

 
faq/faq.txt · Last modified: 2008/05/25 12:18 by leo