MediaTomb News

Hi everyone, I’m currently on holidays without a permanent internet access. This means that I will not be able to answer questions in the forums and give support.

I’ll be back in about a month :>

We had reports about problems with our static package for the WL500g, something was going wrong, as the result the server was eating up about 90% CPU time, same problem was also visible on the Linksys WRT350N

Thanks to npmccallum who helped us debugging, we were able to investigate and fix this problem.

We received further success reports, the static packages were tested on the Buffalo LinkStation Live, Conceptronic CH3WNAS, Emtec Movie Cube R500, AVM FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7270 and Thecus N4100Plus.

What about 0.12? We’re trying :>

Some time ago we started to work on static MediaTomb packages for various NAS devices, now we have the first results.

Thanks to everyone who responded and helped testing!

So far we have working and tested packages for the Maxtor MSS-I, Asus WL500g, Promise NS4300N, Encore ENNHD-1GS and the Raidsonic IB-NAS4200-B. The packages should also run on other devices – just check the architecture. We have a MIPS-II little endian (mips2el), a MIPS32 little endian (mips32el),an ARM 9 little endian (armv4), OABI and a PPC (ppce300c2) versions.

Tests for more architectures continue, so the list is likely to increase.

You will find the new packages in the download section.

After numerous requests we added a Wiki to our site. Currently we have three topics that can be edited by users: FAQ, Scripting and Transcoding

That means that from now on you can share your favorite transcoding and import scripts and you can also help us to fill the FAQ.

Some news on the static packages: I received a few responses and we successfully tested the statically linked version of MediaTomb on the MSS-I, WL500g and the NS4300N. We will release these packages soon.

Seeing that more and more NAS devices are coming out, we thought that it may be a good idea to offer users another option to easily install and run MediaTomb. Although there are nice things like Optware and other community firmware projects, some users may simply not want to completely replace the original firmware on their units.

The easiest solution for this case is to offer statically linked binary packages. They do not have any additional dependencies, all required libraries are already linked in, so one will only have to pick the correct package for the given architecture and that’s it. Since the packages are completely independent from the rest of the system they should run on existing vendor firmware without much trouble.

However – we need your help. We can offer cross compiled packages for various architectures, but we usually do not have the hardware to test if they are actually working. That’s why we are looking for volunteers who are willing to test these packages – once we get a confirmation that everything works as expected we will make the package available for public download.

If you have a NAS with shell access and would like to help – please contact us!

I started a thread in the forums about this, don’t hesitate to post in case of questions.

Let’s start with some good news, an ebuild for MediaTomb is now available in Gentoo. Thanks to BT for helping out with this! Currently it’s only there for amd64, users will have to request it for other architectures.

Now to some bad news, here’s an interesting post regarding the 2.20 PS3 firmware. It seems like we can not do anything but wait for Sony to fix it.

Last but not least a word on the next release – of course we’re not saying when it will be done, but there are some things about 0.12 that we can reveal.

Support for mp4 metadata is already implemented in SVN, it uses the libmp4v2 library which is able to extract various tags from mp4 files, cover art is also working.

There will also be some performance improvements in terms of import speed, but there are no numbers/measurements yet.

As always – stay tuned!

Bad news for all PS3 users who upgraded to the 2.20 firmware. First reports indicate that transcoding no longer works after the upgrade.

Do not upgrade to the 2.20 firmware if you want to use transcoding!

We will have to investigate if workarounds are possible, but I doubt that there is anything we could do there. Actually it’s getting pretty ridiculous, we added quite a lot of stuff to support the PS3, but there is no end to it – each new firmware upgrade introduces new difficulties, things that work flawlessly with cheap 70EUR players fail on the PS3. What should I say?

I can only suggest that PS3 users call Sony support and complain about the problems. And while you are at it – don’t forget to tell them that playback of online MP3 streams also still does not work. Who knows, maybe if enough people complain they might finally listen.

Still, there are also some good news: we finally made it into Gentoo, I will soon post an update on that in the download section.

More and more binary packages of the new release are becoming available, Fedora, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Optware, Fink and Debian “sid” have already been updated. Ubuntu and Debian stable packages are still handled by our apt repository – “gutsy”, “feisty” and “etch” packages are now also up to date.

There were some improvements regarding the Optware packages, an init script and daemon configuration files are now included. You will find more information on the Optware package related changes in our download section.

As always – it’s been way too long since the last release, but finally it is out. A new version with numerous fixes and the “main event” feature – transcoding.

We decided to implement transcoding via external processes, meaning that you can use any application to convert the data. You have the choice if you want to use vlc, ffmpeg, mencoder or anything else – it’s really up to you. It’s so flexible, that you can even setup transcoding profiles to listen to your text files using a text 2 speech application, stream content that is available via mms or rtsp even if your player does not support it, or plug in a script that will create thumbnails for your movies and more. We provide some examples, but you will probably have to finetune the transcoding options to achieve best results with your player.

Please read the ChangeLog for a full list of changes.

The 0.10.0 version is now available in Debian sid which means that it should also appear in Ubuntu. Packages of the new 0.11.0 version will follow shortly.

So what’s next? We’ll lift the mystery later, for now – enjoy the new release and stay tuned for more.

Usually we do not have much time to work on the web page, luckily we receive some help now and then.

An RSS News Feed for our site is now available, hopefully this will make it easier for you to stay up to date. Thanks a lot to solmumaha for making this possible.

Of course everyone is asking us about the upcoming release and the good news is: it’s about to happen :) We are confident that we can finally make it this month.