Sophie: mediatomb-0.12.0-0.1905.1mdv2009.1 i586

mediatomb-0.12.0-0.1905.1mdv2009.1.i586.rpm

MediaTomb - UPnP MediaServer

This documentation is valid for MediaTomb version 0.11.0.

THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

1.1. Currently Supported Features
1.2. Planned Features

2. Requirements
3. Compiling From Source

3.1. Standard Method
3.2. Configure Options

4. Initial Installation

4.1. Network Setup
4.2. First Time Launch

5. Command Line Options

5.1. IP Address
5.2. Interface
5.3. Port
5.4. Configuration File
5.5. Daemon Mode
5.6. Home Directory
5.7. Config Directory
5.8. Write PID File
5.9. Run Under Different User Name
5.10. Run Under Different Group
5.11. Add Content
5.12. Log To File
5.13. Display Command Line Summary

6. Configuration File

6.1. Server Settings
6.2. Import Settings
6.3. Transcoding Settings

7. Supported Devices

7.1. MediaRenderers
7.2. Network Attached Storage Devices

8. Running The Server
9. Legal

9.1. Copyright
9.2. License

10. Acknowledgments
11. Contributions

1. Introduction

MediaTomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user
interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network
and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.

MediaTomb implements the UPnP MediaServer V 1.0 specification that can be found
on http://www.upnp.org/. The current implementation focuses on parts that are
required by the specification, however we look into extending the functionality
to cover the optional parts of the spec as well.

MediaTomb should work with any UPnP compliant MediaRenderer, please tell us if
you experience difficulties with particular models, also take a look at the
Supported Devices list for more information.

WARNING!

The server has an integrated file system browser in the UI, that means that
anyone who has access to the UI can browse your file system (with user
permissions under which the server is running) and also download your data! If
you want maximum security - disable the UI completely! Account authentication
offers simple protection that might hold back your kids, but it is not secure
enough for use in an untrusted environment!

Note:

since the server is meant to be used in a home LAN environment the UI is
enabled by default and accounts are deactivated, thus allowing anyone on
your network to connect to the user interface.

1.1. Currently Supported Features

* browse and playback your media via UPnP

* metadata extraction from mp3, ogg, flac, jpeg, etc. files.

* Exif thumbnail support

* user defined server layout based on extracted metadata (scriptable virtual
containers)

* automatic directory rescans

* sophisticated web UI with a tree view of the database and the file system,
allowing to add/remove/edit/browse your media

* highly flexible transcoding media format transcoding via plugins / scripts

* support for external URLs (create links to internet content and serve them
via UPnP to your renderer)

* support for ContentDirectoryService container updates

* Active Items (experimental feature), allows execution of server side
scripts upon HTTP GET requests to certain items

* highly flexible configuration, allowing you to control the behavior of
various features of the server

* support for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X

* runs on x86, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, Sparc, PowerPC

1.2. Planned Features

* transcoding of audio and video

* playlist support

* various UPnP improvements

2. Requirements

Note:

remember to install associated development packages, because development
headers are needed for compilation!

Note:

libupnp is now a part of MediaTomb and does not have to be installed
separately. We base our heavily patched version on libupnp 1.4.1 from http:
//pupnp.sf.net/

Note:

you need at least one database in order to compile and run MediaTomb -
either sqlite or mysql.

In order to compile MediaTomb you will have to install the following packages.:

* sqlite (version > 3.x) http://www.sqlite.org/ REQUIRED (if mysql is not
available)

* mysql client library (version > 4.0.x) http://mysql.org/ REQUIRED (if
sqlite is not available)

* expat http://expat.sourceforge.net/ OPTIONAL, RECOMMENDED

Expat is a very good and robust XML parser, so far we have been using our
own, but ran into problems from time to time. So from now on eXpat is the
preferred for parsing XML in MediaTomb.

* zlib http://www.zlib.net/ OPTIONAL, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Zlib is a compression library that is available on most systems, we need it
for the database autocreation functionality. Make sure to install the zlib
development package providing zlib.h, if it is not available you will need
to create the MediaTomb sqlite3/MySQL database manually.

* libmagic OPTIONAL, RECOMMENDED

This is the 'file' package, it is used to determine the mime type of the
media. If you don't have this you will have to enter file extension to mime
type mappings manually in your config file.

* js - SpiderMonkey JavaScript Engine http://www.mozilla.org/js/spidermonkey/
OPTIONAL, RECOMMENDED

This package is necessary to allow the user defined creation of virtual
containers. The import.js script defines the layout of your media, the
default import script will create a structure sorted by Audio/Photo/Video,
it will make use of the gathered metadata (like ID3 tags) to sort your
music by Artist/Album/Genre/Year , etc. The import script can be adjusted
and modified - it allows you to create the layout that you want.

* taglib http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html OPTIONAL, RECOMMENDED

This library retrieves metadata from mp3, ogg and flac files. You will need
it if you want to have virtual objects for those files (i.e. nice content
layout).

Note:

It makes no sense to use taglib and id3lib at the same time, the
configure script will first look for TagLib, if TagLib detection fails
it will search for id3lib. You can also force the configure script to
take the library of your choice, overriding the default setting.

* id3lib http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/ (at least version 3.8.3) OPTIONAL,
RECOMMENDED (if TagLib is not available)

This library retrieves id3 tags from mp3 files.

* libexif http://libexif.sourceforge.net/ OPTIONAL, RECOMMENDED

You will need this library if you want to extract metadata from images,
this will allow you to have virtual containers for your Photos, sorted by
various attributes like Date, etc. It also enables thumbnail support: if
EXIF thumbnails are present in your images they will also be offered via
UPnP.

* curl http://curl.haxx.se/ OPTIONAL

curl is a library that allows to easily fetch content from the web,
combined with the external transcoding it offers some additional
functionality and enables the use of plugins that have no builtin online
content support.

* libextractor http://gnunet.org/libextractor/ OPTIONAL

This library tries to gather metadata from all kinds of files (also .avi
and .asf). The drawback is, that it can be very slow at scanning video
files. We also noticed that it uses a lot of memory when reading files, the
result is, that media import becomes extremely slow. It is up to you if you
want to use it or not, you may try the 'extract' utility that is provided
with the library to check if there is any metadata that can be extracted
from your media prior to enabling this feature in MediaTomb. By default
libextractor is disabled, use ./configure --enable-libextractor to activate
it.

* ffmpeg http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ OPTIONAL

Currently ffmpeg is used to gather additional metadata from audio and video
files.

In order to use the web UI you will need to have javascript enabled in your web
browser.

The UI has been tested and works with the recent versions of :

* Firefox/Mozilla

* Opera

Tested and does not work with the recent versions of:

* Konqueror

* Safari

Limited functionality with:

* Internet Explorer 6 and 7

3. Compiling From Source

3.1. Standard Method

If you don't care about the details - make sure you have installed the required
packages and the appropriate development headers and simply run

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

This should compile and install MediaTomb, the resulting binary is ready to
run.

Note:

if you checked out the sources from SVN the configure script will not be
available, you will have to create it with the following command:

autoreconf -i

3.2. Configure Options

The MediaTomb configure script provides a large variety of options, allowing
you to specify the additional libraries that will be used, features that will
be compiled or disabled, workarounds for known bugs in some distributions and
so on. Some options are straightforward, some require deeper knowledge - make
sure you know what you are doing :)

3.2.1. Install Location Of Architecture Independent Files

--prefix=PREFIX

Default:

/usr/local/

Install all architecture independent files - all .js files and .png images for
the Web UI, the import.js script, the service description XML files - in the
directory of your choice. This is especially useful if you do not want to
perform a system-wide installation, but want to install MediaTomb only for your
user.

Important:

the prefix path will be compiled into the binary; the binary will still be
relocatable, but you move those files you will have to point MediaTomb to
the proper location by specifying it in the server configuration file.

3.2.2. Static Build

--enable-static

Default:

disabled

Build a static binary. This may be useful if you plan to install a precompiled
MediaTomb binary on a system that does not have all the required libraries and
where installation of those libraries is not possible due to reasons beyond
your control.

Note:

if you enable this option, make sure that you have all static versions of
the appropriate libraries installed on your system. The configure script
may not detect that those are missing - in this case you will get linker
errors. Some distributions, for example Fedora Core, do not ship static
library versions.

3.2.3. Automatically Create Database

--enable-db-autocreate

Default:

enabled

Automatically create the database if it is missing (for example upon a first
time launch). Disabling this will make the resulting binary a little smaller,
however you will have to take care of the database creation yourself by
invoking the appropriate .sql scripts that are provided with the package.

Note:

the server configuration file has to be setup correctly. Either sqlite or
MySQL has to be chosen in the storage section, for sqlite the database file
has to point to a writable location, for MySQL the user has to be setup
with a valid password and permissions and the database "mediatomb" has to
exist.

3.2.4. Debug Malloc/Realloc Of Zero bytes

--enable-debug-malloc0

Default:

disabled

This feature is only for debugging purposes, whenever a malloc or realloc with
a value of zero bytes is encountered, the server will terminate with abort()

3.2.5. Force Linking With The Pthread Library

--enable-pthread-lib

Default:

disabled

We use the ACX_PTHREAD macro from the autoconf archive to determine the way how
to link against the pthread library. Usually it works fine, but it can fail
when cross compiling. This configure option tells us to use -lpthread when
linking, it seems to be needed when building MediaTomb under Optware. Note,
that using --disable-pthread-lib will not prevent automatic checks against the
pthread library.

3.2.6. Force Linking With The Iconv Library

--enable-iconv-lib

Default:

disabled

By default we will attempt to use iconv functionality provided with glibc,
however under some circumstances it may make sense to link against a separate
iconv library. This option will attempt to do that. Note, that using
--disable-iconv-lib will not prevent automatic attempts to link ageinst the
iconv library in the case where builtin glibc iconv functionality is not
available.

3.2.7. Use Atomic Assembler Code For x86 Single CPU systems

--enable-atomic-x86-single

Default:

disabled

Use assembler code suited for single CPU x86 machines. This may improve
performance, but your binary will not function properly on SMP systems. If you
specify this for a non x86 architecture the binary will not run at all. If you
wonder about the purpose of assembler code in a mediaserver application: we
need it for atomic operations that are required for reference counting. The
pthread library will be used as a fallback for other architectures, but can
also be forced by a designated configure option. This however, will have the
worst performance.

By default x86 SMP code will be used on x86 systems - it will reliably work on
both SMP and single CPU systems, but will not be as fast as the
atomic-x86-single option on uniprocessor machines.

3.2.8. Use Pthread Code For Atomic Operations

--enable-atomic-pthread

Default:

auto detect

This is the default setting for non x86 architectures, we may add assembler
optimizations for other architectures as well, but currently only x86
optimizations are available. This option may also be safely used on x86
machines - the drawback is poor performance, compared to assembler optimized
code.

3.2.9. Enable SIGHUP Handling

--enable-sighup

This option turns on SIGHUP handling, every time a SIGHUP is caught we will
attempt to restart the server and reread the configuration file. By default
this feature is enabled for x86 platforms, but is disabled for others. We
discovered that MediaTomb will not cleanly restart on ARM based systems,
investigations revealed that this is somehow related to an unclean libupnp
shutdown. This will be fixed in a later release.

Default:

auto detect

3.2.10. X_MS_MediaReceiverRegistrar Support

--enable-mrreg-service

Default:

disabled

This option will enable the compilation and support of the
X_MS_MediaReceiverRegistrar UPnP service, this was implemented for future Xbox
360 support. If you have a renderer that requires this service, you can safely
enable it. It will always return true to IsValidated and IsAuthorized requests.

Note:

eventhough this service is implemented there is still no Xbox 360 support
in MediaTomb, more work needs to be done.

3.2.11. Playstation 3 Support

--enable-protocolinfo-extension

Default:

enabled

This option allows to send additional information in the protocolInfo
attribute, this will enable MP3 and MPEG4 playback for the Playstation 3, but
may also be useful to some other renderers.

Note:

allthough compiled in, this feature is disabled in configuration by
default.

3.2.12. Fseeko Check

--disable-fseeko-check

Default:

enabled

This is a workaround for a bug in some Debian distributions, disable this check
if you know that your system has large file support, but configure fails to
detect it.

3.2.13. Largefile Support

--disable-largefile

Default:

auto

By default largefile support will be auto detected by configure, however you
can disable it if you do not want it or if you experience problems with it on
your system.

3.2.14. Redefinition Of Malloc And Realloc

--disable-rpl-malloc

Default:

enabled

Autoconf may redefine malloc and realloc functions to rpl_malloc and
rpl_realloc, usually this will happen if the autotools think that you are
compiling against a non GNU C library. Since malloc and realloc may behave
different on other systems, this gives us the opportunity to write wrapper
functions to handle special cases. However, this redefinition may get triggered
when cross compiling, even if you are compiling against the GNU C lib. If this
is the case, you can use this option to disable the redefinition.

3.2.15. SQLite Support

--enable-sqlite3

Default:

enabled

The SQLite database is very easy in installation and use, you do not have to
setup any users, permissions, etc. A database file will be simply created as
specified in the MediaTomb configuration. At least SQLite version 3 is
required.

3.2.16. MySQL Support

--enable-mysql

Default:

enabled

MySQL is a very powerful database, however it requires some additional setup.
You will find information on how to setup MediaTomb with MySQL in the
Installation section.

3.2.17. SpiderMonkey LibJS Support

--enable-libjs

Default:

enabled

SpiderMonkey is Mozilla's JavaScript engine, it plays a very important role in
MediaTomb. We use it to create a nice virtual container layout based on the
metadata that is extracted from your media. We also allow the user to create
custom import scripts, so everyone has the possibility to adapt the layout to
ones personal needs. Read more about this in the installation section.

The main problem with this library is, that it is called differently on various
distributions and that it is installed in different locations. For example, it
is called js on Fedora, but is available under the name of smjs on Debian. If
configure fails to find your js headers and libraries you can point it to the
desired locations (see options below).

3.2.18. Filemagic Support

--enable-libmagic

Default:

enabled

This library determines the file type and provides us with the appropriate mime
type information. It is very important to correctly determine the mime type of
your media - this information will be sent to your renderer. Based on the mime
type information, the renderer will decide if it can play/display the
particular file or not. If auto detection returns strange mime types, you may
want to do a check using the 'file' command (the 'file' package must be
installed on your system). Assuming that you want to check somefile.avi enter
the following in your terminal:

$ file -i somefile.avi

This will print the detected mime type, this is exactly the information that we
use in MediaTomb. You can override auto detection by defining appropriate file
extension to mime type mappings in your configuration file. You can also edit
the mime type information of an imported object manually via the web UI.

3.2.19. Id3lib Support

--enable-id3lib

Default:

disabled, used if taglib is not available

This library will parse id3 tags of your MP3 files, the gathered information
will be saved in the database and provided via UPnP. Further, the gathered
metadata will be used by the import script to create a nice container layout
(Audio/Artist/Album, etc.)

3.2.20. Taglib Support

--enable-taglib

Default:

enabled, preffered over id3lib

This library will parse id3 tags of your MP3 files as well as information
provided with flac files. It claims to be faster than id3lib, but it also seems
to have some drawbacks. We had some cases where it crashed when trying to parse
tags of certain MP3 files on embedded systems, we had reports and observed that
it had problems parsing the sample rates. We also did some valgrinding and
detected memory leaks. Our feeling is, that you will have more stable results
with id3lib, however it is up to you to enable or disable this library. By
default id3lib will be taken if both libraries are present on the system.

3.2.21. Libexif Support

--enable-libexif

Default:

enabled

The exif library will gather metadata from your photos, it will also find exif
thumbnails which are created automatically by most digital camera models. The
gathered data will be used by the import script, the thumbnails will be offered
as additional resources via UPnP.

3.2.22. Libextractor Support

--enable-libextractor

Default:

disabled

Libextractor is a library that attempts to parse all sorts of files, this
includes exif data, id3 tags and much more. It can also deal with .AVI and .ASF
files which is useful when your video files have the appropriate metadata. The
drawback is - it is slow, especially slow on scanning big video files, so it
slows down the import process considerably. For this reason this library is
disabled by default.

3.2.23. Inotify Support

--enable-inotify

Default:

auto

Inotify is a kernel mechanism that allows monitoring of filesystem events. You
need this if you want to use the Inotify Autoscan mode, contrary to the Timed
mode which recsans given directories in specified intervals, Inotify mode will
immedeately propagate changes in monitored directories on the filesystem to the
database.

If you do not specify this option configure will check if inotify works on the
build system and compile it in only if the check succeeds. If you specify this
option, the functionality will be compiled in even if the build system does not
support inotify - the availability of inotify will then be checked at server
runtime.

3.2.24. External Transcoding

--enable-external-transcoding

Default:

enabled

3.2.25. Curl

--enable-curl

Default:

enabled if external transcoding feature is turned on

It only makes sense to enable the curl library if External Transcoding is
turned on.

3.2.26. Ffmpeg Support

--enable-ffmpeg

Default:

enabled

Currently the ffmpeg library is used to extract additional information from
audio and video files. It is also capable of reading out the tag information
from theora content. It is not yet used for transcoding, so this feature only
gathers additional metadata.

3.2.27. libexpat Support

--enable-expat

Default:

enabled

Expat is a very good XML parser, until now we were doing the parsing ourselves
and occaisonally ran into problems. Turning this feature on will ensure that
expat is used instead of our internal parser, thus making the parsing more
robust.

3.2.28. MediaTomb Debug Output

--enable-tombdebug

Default:

disabled

This option enables debug output, the server will print out a lot of
information which is mainly interesting to developers. Use this if you are
trying to trace down a bug or a problem, the additional output may give you
some clues.

3.2.29. UPnP Library Debug Output

--enable-upnpdebug

Default:

disabled

This option enables debug output of the UPnP SDK. You should not need it under
normal circumstances.

3.2.30. Log Output

--disable-log

Default:

enabled

This option allows you to suppress all log output from the server.

3.2.31. Package Search Directory

--with-search=DIR

Default:

/opt/local/ on Darwin, /usr/local/ on all other systems

Some systems may have whole sets of packages installed in an alternative
location, for example Darwinports on OSX get installed to /opt/local/. This
option tells the configure script to additionally search for headers and
libraries of various packages in DIR/include and DIR/lib.

3.2.32. Specifying Header And Library Locations Of Various Packages

You can specify the exact location of particular headers and libraries. Some
packages use extra programs that tell us the appropriate flags that are needed
for compilation - like mysql_config. You can also specify the exact location of
those programs. The parameters are self explanatory, in case of headers and
libraries the DIR parameter is the directory where those headers and libraries
are located.

--with-sqlite3-h=DIR search for sqlite3 headers only in DIR
--with-sqlite3-libs=DIR search for sqlite3 libraries only in DIR
--with-mysql-cfg=mysql_config absolute path/name of mysql_config
--with-js-h=DIR search for js (spidermonkey) headers in DIR
--with-js-libs=DIR search for js (spidermonkey) libraries in DIR
--with-magic-h=DIR search for filemagic headers in DIR
--with-magic-libs=DIR search for filemagic headers in DIR
--with-exif-h=DIR search for libexif headers in DIR
--with-exif-libs=DIR search for libexif libraries in DIR
--with-expat-h=DIR search for expat headers in DIR
--with-expat-libs=DIR search for expat libraries in DIR
--with-taglib-cfg=taglib-config absolute path/name of taglib-config
--with-id3lib-h=DIR search for id3lib headers in DIR
--with-id3lib-libs=DIR search for id3lib libraries in DIR
--with-zlib-h=DIR search for zlib headers in DIR
--with-zlib-libs=DIR search for zlib libraries in DIR
--with-inotify-h=DIR search for inotify header in DIR
--with-iconv-h=DIR search for iconv headers in DIR/sys
--with-iconv-libs=DIR search for iconv libraries in DIR
--with-extractor-h=DIR search for extractor headers in DIR
--with-extractor-libs=DIR search for extractor libraries in DIR
--with-ffmpeg-h=DIR search for ffmpeg headers in DIR
--with-ffmpeg-libs=DIR search for ffmpeg libraries in DIR
--with-curl-cfg=curl-config absolute path/name of curl-config script

3.2.33. The devconf Script

If you are doing some development work and some debugging, you will probably
want to compile with the -g flag and also disable optimization. The devconf
script does exactly that. In addition, it accepts command line parameters that
are passed to the configure script.

4. Initial Installation

4.1. Network Setup

Some systems require a special setup on the network interface. If MediaTomb
exits with UPnP Error -117, or if it does not respond to M-SEARCH requests from
the renderer (i.e. MediaTomb is running, but your renderer device does not show
it) you should try the following settings (the lines below assume that
MediaTomb is running on a Linux machine, on network interface eth1):

# route add -net 239.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 eth1
# ifconfig eth1 allmulti

Those settings will be applied automatically by the init.d startup script.

You should also make sure that your firewall is not blocking port UDP port 1900
(required for SSDP) and UDP/TCP port of MediaTomb. By default MediaTomb will
select a free port starting with 49152, however you can specify a port of your
choice in the configuration file.

4.2. First Time Launch

When starting MediaTomb for the first time, a .mediatomb directory will be
created in your home. Further, a default server configuration file, called
config.xml will be generated in that directory.

4.2.1. Using Sqlite Database

If you are using sqlite - you are ready to go, the database file will be
created automatically and will be located ~/.mediatomb/mediatomb.db If needed
you can adjust the database file name and location in the server configuration
file.

4.2.2. Using MySQL Database

If MediaTomb was compiled with support for both databases, sqlite will be
chosen as default because the initial database can be created and used without
any user interaction. If MediaTomb was compiled only with MySQL support, the
appropriate config.xml file will be created in the ~/.mediatomb directory, but
the server will then terminate, because user interaction is required.

MediaTomb has to be able to connect to the MySQL server and at least the
(empty) database has to exist. To create the database and provide MediaTomb
with the ability to connect to the MySQL server you need to have the
appropriate permissions. Note that user names and passwords in MySQL have
nothing to do with UNIX accounts, MySQL has it's own user names/passwords.
Connect to the MySQL database as "root" or any other user with the appropriate
permissions:

$ mysql [-u <username>] [-p]

(You'll probably need to use "-u" to specify a different MySQL user and "-p" to
specify a password.)

Create a new database for MediaTomb: (substitute "<database name>" with the
name of the database)

mysql> CREATE DATABASE <database name>;

(You can also use "mysqladmin" instead.)

Give MediaTomb the permissions to access the database:

mysql> GRANT ALL ON <database name>.*
TO '<user name>'@'<hostname>'
IDENTIFIED BY '<password>';

If you don't want to set a password, omit "IDENTIFIED BY .." completely. You
could also use the MySQL "root" user with MediaTomb directly, but this is not
recommended.

To create a database and a user named "mediatomb" (who is only able to connect
via "localhost") without a password (the defaults) use:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE mediatomb;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON mediatomb.* TO 'mediatomb'@'localhost';

If MediaTomb was compiled with database auto creation the tables will be
created automatically during the first startup. All table names have a "mt_"
prefix, so you can theoretically share the database with a different
application. However, this is not recommended.

If database auto creation wasn't compiled in (configure was run with the
"--disable-db-autocreate" or zlib.h was not available) you have to create the
tables manually:

$ mysql [-u <username>] [-p] \
<database name> < \
<install prefix>/share/mediatomb/mysql.sql

After creating the database and making the appropriate changes in your
MediaTomb config file you are ready to go - launch the server, and everything
should work.

5. Command Line Options

There is a number of options that can be passed via command line upon server
start up, for a short summary you can invoke MediaTomb with the following
parameter:

$ mediatomb --help

Note:

the command line options override settings in the configuration file!

5.1. IP Address

--ip or -i

The server will bind to the given IP address, currently we can not bind to
multiple interfaces so binding to 0.0.0.0 will not be possible.

5.2. Interface

--interface or -e

Interface to bind to, for example eth0, this can be specified instead of the ip
address.

5.3. Port

--port or -p

Specify the server port that will be used for the web user interface, for
serving media and for UPnP requests, minimum allowed value is 49152. If this
option is omitted a default port will be chosen, however, in this case it is
possible that the port will change upon server restart.

5.4. Configuration File

--config or -c

By default MediaTomb will search for a file named "config.xml" in the ~
/.mediatomb directory. This option allows you to specify a config file by the
name and location of your choice. The file name must be absolute.

5.5. Daemon Mode

--daemon or -d

Run the server in background, MediaTomb will shutdown on SIGTERM, SIGINT and
restart on SIGHUP.

5.6. Home Directory

--home or -m

Specify an alternative home directory. By default MediaTomb will try to
retrieve the users home directory from the environment, then it will look for a
.mediatomb directory in users home. If .mediatomb was found we will try to find
the default configuration file (config.xml), if not found we will create both,
the .mediatomb directory and the default config file.

This option is useful in two cases: when the home directory can not be
retrieved from the environment (in this case you could also use -c to point
MediaTomb to your configuration file or when you want to create a new
configuration in a non standard location (for example, when setting up daemon
mode). In the latter case you can combine this parameter with the parameter
described in Section 5.7, "Config Directory"

5.7. Config Directory

--cfgdir or -f

The default configuration directory is combined out of the users home and the
default that equals to .mediatomb, this option allows you to override the
default directory naming. This is useful when you want to setup the server in a
nonstandard location, but want that the default configuration to be written by
the server.

5.8. Write PID File

--pidfile or -P

Specify a file that will hold the server process ID, the filename must be
absolute.

5.9. Run Under Different User Name

--user or -u

Run MediaTomb under the specified user name, this is especially useful in
combination with the daemon mode.

5.10. Run Under Different Group

--group or -g

Run MediaTomb under the specified group, this is especially useful in
combination with the daemon mode.

5.11. Add Content

--add or -a

Add the specified directory or file name to the database without UI
interaction. The path must be absolute, if path is a directory then it will be
added recursively. If path is a file, then only the given file will be
imported.

5.12. Log To File

--logfile or -l

Do not output log messages to stdout, but redirect everything to a specified
file.

5.13. Display Command Line Summary

--help or -h

Print a summary about the available command line options.

6. Configuration File

MediaTomb is highly configurable and allows the user to set various options and
preferences that define the servers behavior. Rather than enforcing certain
features upon the user, we prefer to offer a number of choices where possible.
The heart of MediaTomb configuration is the config.xml file, which is located
in the ~/.mediatomb directory. If the configuration file is not found in the
default location and no configuration was specified on the command line,
MediaTomb will generate a default config.xml file in the ~/.mediatomb
directory. The file is in the XML format and can be edited by a simple text
editor, here is the list of all available options:

* "Required" means that the server will not start if the tag is missing in
the configuration.

* "Optional" means that the tag can be left out of the configuration file.

The root tag of MediaTomb configuration is:

6.1. Server Settings

These settings define the server configuration, this includes UPnP behavior,
selection of database, accounts for the UI as well as installation locations of
shared data.

Required

This section defines the server configuration parameters.

Child tags:

* <port>0</port>

Optional

Default: 0 (automatic)

Specifies the port where the server will be listening for HTTP requests.
Note, that because of the implementation in the UPnP SDK only ports above
49152 are supported. The value of zero means, that a port will be
automatically selected by the SDK.

* <ip>192.168.0.23</ip>

Optional

Default: ip of the first available interface.

Specifies the IP address to bind to, by default one of the available
interfaces will be selected.

* <interface>eth0</interface>

Optional

Default: first available interface.

Specifies the interface to bind to, by default one of the available
interfaces will be selected.

* <name>MediaTomb</name>

Optional

Default: MediaTomb

Server friendly name, you will see this on your devices that you use to
access the server.

* <manufacturerURL>http://mediatomb.org/</manufacturerURL>

Optional

Default: http://mediatomb.cc/

This tag sets the manufacturer URL of a UPnP device, a custom setting may
be necessary to trick some renderers in order to enable special features
that otherwise are only active with the vendor implemented server.

* <modelName>MediaTomb</modelName>

Optional

Default: MediaTomb

This tag sets the model name of a UPnP device, a custom setting may be
necessary to trick some renderers in order to enable special features that
otherwise are only active with the vendor implemented server.

* <modelNumber>0.9.0</modelNumber>

Optional

Default: MediaTomb version

This tag sets the model number of a UPnP device, a custom setting may be
necessary to trick some renderers in order to enable special features that
otherwise are only active with the vendor implemented server.

* <serialNumber>1</serialNumber>

Optional

Default: 1

This tag sets the serial number of a UPnP device.

* <presentationURL append-to="ip">80/index.html</presentationURL>

Optional

Default: "/"

The presentation URL defines the location of the servers user interface,
usually you do not need to change this however, vendors who want to ship
our server along with their NAS devices may want to point to the main
configuration page of the device.

Attributes:

o append-to=...

Optional

Default: "none"

The append-to attribute defines how the text in the presentationURL tag
should be treated.

The allowed values are:

append-to="none"

Use the string exactly as it appears in the presentationURL tag.

append-to="ip"

Append the string specified in the presentationURL tag to the ip
address of the server, this is useful in a dynamic ip environment where
you do not know the ip but want to point the URL to the port of your
web server.

append-to="port"

Append the string specified in the presentationURL tag to the server ip
and port, this may be useful if you want to serve some static pages
using the built in web server.

* <udn/>

Required

Default: automatically generated if the tag is empty

Unique Device Name, according to the UPnP spec it must be consistent
throughout reboots. You can fill in something yourself, but we suggest that
you leave this tag empty - it will be filled out and saved automatically
after the first launch of the server.

* <home>/home/your_user_name/.mediatomb</home>

Required

Default: ~/.mediatomb

Server home - the server will search for the data that it needs relative to
this directory - basically for the sqlite database file. The mediatomb.html
bookmark file will also be generated in that directory.

* <webroot>/usr/share/mediatomb/web</webroot>

Required

Default: depends on the installation prefix that is passed to the configure
script.

Root directory for the web server, this is the location where device
description documents, UI html and js files, icons, etc. are stored.

* <servedir>/home/myuser/mystuff</servedir>

Optional

Default: empty (disabled)

Files from this directory will be served as from a regular web server. They
do not need to be added to the database, but they are also not served via
UPnP browse requests. Directory listing is not supported, you have to
specify full paths.

Example:

the file something.jar is located in /home/myuser/mystuff/javasubdir/
something.jar on your filesystem. Your ip address is 192.168.0.23, the
server is running on port 50500. Assuming the above configuration you
could download it by entering this link in your web browser: http://
192.168.0.23:50500/content/serve/javasubdir/something.jar

* <alive>180</alive>

Optional

Default: 180, this is according to the UPnP specification.

Interval for broadcasting SSDP:alive messages

* <protocolInfo extend="no"/>

Optional

Default: no

Adds specific tags to the protocolInfo attribute, this is required to
enable MP3 and MPEG4 playback on Playstation 3.

* <retries-on-timeout>0<retries-on-timeout>

Optional

Default: 0 - disabled

This enables special error handling for the case that it is not possible to
write to the client socket, but no error is reported by select (select
keeps timing out). In this situation we may run out of threads, the option
above allows some finetuning - we will shutdown the socket after a specific
number of retries.

Note:

don't enable this option if you are not experiencing this particular
problem, this was implemented as a workaround for some Playstation 3
related error cases.

* <pc-directory upnp-hide="no"/>

Optional

Default: no

Enabling this option will make the PC-Directory container invisible for
UPnP devices.

Note:

independent of the above setting the container will be always visible
in the web UI!

* <tmpdir>/tmp/</tmpdir>

Optional

Default: /tmp/

Selects the temporary directory that will be used by the server.

* <bookmark>mediatomb.html</bookmark>

Optional

Default: mediatomb.html

The bookmark file offers an easy way to access the user interface, it is
especially helpful when the server is not configured to run on a fixed
port. Each time the server is started, the bookmark file will be filled in
with a redirect to the servers current IP address and port. To use it,
simply bookmark this file in your browser, the default location is ~
/.mediatomb/mediatomb.html

* <custom-http-headers>

Optional

This section holds the user defined HTTP headers that will be added to all
HTTP responses that come from the server.

Child tags:

o <add header="..."/>
<add header="..."/>
...

Optional

Specify a header to be added to the response. If you have a DSM-320 use
<add header="X-User-Agent: redsonic"/> to fix the .AVI playback
problem.

* <upnp-string-limit>

Optional

Default: disabled

This will limit title and description length of containers and items in
UPnP browse replies, this feature was added a s workaround for the TG100
bug which can only handle titles no longer than 100 characters. A negative
value will disable this feature, the minimum allowed value is "4" because
three dots will be appended to the string if it has been cut off to
indicate that limiting took place.

* <ui enabled="yes" poll-interval="2" poll-when-idle="no"/>

Optional

This section defines various user interface settings.

WARNING!

The server has an integrated filesystem browser, that means that anyone who
has access to the UI can browse your filesystem (with user permissions
under which the server is running) and also download your data! If you want
maximum security - disable the UI completely! Account authentication offers
simple protection that might hold back your kids, but it is not secure
enough for use in an untrusted environment!

Note:

since the server is meant to be used in a home LAN environment the UI
is enabled by default and accounts are deactivated, thus allowing
anyone on your network to connect to the user interface.

Attributes:

o enabled=...

Optional

Default: yes

Enables ("yes") or disables ("no") the web user interface.

o poll-interval=...

Optional

Default: 2

The poll-interval is an integer value which specifies how often the UI
will poll for tasks. The interval is specified in seconds, only values
greater than zero are allowed.

o poll-when-idle=...

Optional

Default: no

The poll-when-idle attribute influences the behavior of displaying
current tasks: - when the user does something in the UI (i.e. clicks
around) we always poll for the current task and will display it - if a
task is active, we will continue polling in the background and update
the current task view accordingly - when there is no active task (i.e.
the server is currently idle) we will stop the background polling and
only request updates upon user actions, but not when the user is idle
(i.e. does not click around in the UI)

Setting poll-when-idle to "yes" will do background polling even when
there are no current tasks; this may be useful if you defined multiple
users and want to see the tasks the other user is queuing on the server
while you are actually idle.

The tasks that are monitored are:

- adding files or directories

- removing items or containers

- automatic rescans

Child tags:

o <accounts enabled="yes" session-timeout="30"/>

Optional

This section holds various account settings.

Attributes:

- enabled=...

Optional

Default: yes

Specifies if accounts are enabled ("yes") or disabled ("no").

- session-timeout=...

Optional

Default: 30

The session-timeout attribute specifies the timeout interval in
minutes. The server checks every five minutes for sessions that
have timed out, therefore in the worst case the session times out
after session-timeout + 5 minutes.

Accounts can be defined as shown below:

- <account user="name" password="password"/>
<account user="name" password="password"/>
....

Optional

There can be multiple users, however this is mainly a feature for
the future. Right now there are no per-user permissions.

o <items-per-page default="25">

Optional

Default: 25

This sets the default number of items per page that will be shown when
browsing the database in the web UI.

The values for the items per page drop down menu can be defined in the
following manner:

- <option>10</option>
<option>25</option>
<option>50</option>
<option>100</option>

Default: 10, 25, 50, 100

Note:

this list must contain the default value, i.e. if you define a
default value of 25, then one of the <option> tags must also
list this value.

* <storage>

Required

Defines the storage section - database selection is done here. Currently
sqlite3 and mysql are supported. Each storage driver has it's own
configuration parameters.

o <sqlite enabled="yes>

Required if MySQL is not defined

Allowed values are "sqlite3" or "mysql", the available options depend
on the selected driver.

- enabled="yes"

Optional

Default: yes

Below are the sqlite driver options:

- <database-file>mediatomb.db</database-file>

Optional

Default: mediatomb.db

The database location is relative to the server's home, if the
sqlite database does not exist it will be created automatically.

- <synchronous>off</synchronous>

Optional

Default: off

Possible values are "off", "normal" and "full".

This option sets the SQLite pragma "synchronous". This setting will
affect the performance of the database write operations. For more
information about this option see the SQLite documentation: http://
www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous

- <on-error>restore</on-error>

Optional

Default: restore

Possible values are "restore" and "fail".

This option tells MediaTomb what to do if an SQLite error occurs
(no database or a corrupt database). If it is set to "restore" it
will try to restore the database from a backup file (if one exists)
or try to recreate a new database from scratch.

If the option is set to "fail", MediaTomb will abort on an SQLite
error.

- <backup enabled="no" interval="6000"/>

Optional

Backup parameters:

* enabled=...

Optional

Default: no

Enables or disables database backup.

* interval=...

Optional

Default: 600

Defines the backup interval in seconds.

o <mysql enabled="no"/>

Defines the MySQL storage driver section.

- enabled=...

Optional

Default: yes

Enables or disables the MySQL driver.

Below are the child tags for MySQL:

- <host>localhost</host>

Optional

Default: "localhost"

This specifies the host where your MySQL database is running.

- <port>0</port>

Optional

Default: 0

This specifies the port where your MySQL database is running.

- <username>root</username>

Optional

Default: "mediatomb"

This option sets the user name that will be used to connect to the
database.

- <password></password>

Optional

Default: no password

Defines the password for the MySQL user. If the tag doesn't exist
MediaTomb will use no password, if the tag exists, but is empty
MediaTomb will use an empty password. MySQL has a distinction
between no password and an empty password.

- <database>mediatomb</database>

Optional

Default: "mediatomb"

Name of the database that will be used by MediaTomb.

6.2. Import Settings

The import settings define various options on how to aggregate the content.

Optional

This tag defines the import section.

Attributes:

* hidden-files=...

Optional

Default: no

This attribute defines if files starting with a dot will be imported into
the database ("yes"). Autoscan can override this attribute on a per
directory basis.

Child tags:

* <filesystem-charset>ISO-8859-1</filesystem-charset>

Optional

Default: if nl_langinfo() function is present, this setting will be auto
detected based on your system locale, else set to ISO-8859-1

Defines the charset of the filesystem. For example, if you have file names
in Cyrillic KOI8-R encoding, then you should specify that here. The server
uses UTF-8 internally, this import parameter will help you to correctly
import your data.

* <metadata-charset>ISO-8859-1</metadata-charset>

Optional

Default: if nl_langinfo() function is present, this setting will be auto
detected based on your system locale, else set to ISO-8859-1

Same as above, but defines the charset of the metadata (i.e. id3 tags, Exif
information, etc.)

* <scripting script-charset="UTF-8">

Optional

Defines the scripting section.

o script-charset=...

Optional

Default: UTF-8

Below are the available scripting options:

o <virtual-layout type="builtin">

Optional

Defines options for the virtual container layout; the so called
"virtual container layout" is the way how the server organizes the
media according to the extracted metadata. For example, it allows
sorting audio files by Album, Artist, Year and so on.

- type=...

Optional

Default: builtin

Specifies what will be used to create the virtual layout, possible
values are:

* builtin: a default layout will be created by the server

* js: a user customizable javascript will be used (MediaTomb must
be compiled with js support)

* disabled: only PC-Directory structure will be created, i.e. no
virtual layout

The virtual layout can be adjusted using an import script which is
defined as follows:

- <import-script>/path/to/my/import-script.js</script>

Required if virtual layout type is "js"

Default: ${prefix}/share/mediatomb/js/import.js, where ${prefix} is
your installation prefix directory.

Points to the script invoked upon media import. For more details
read doc/scripting.txt

o <common-script>/path/to/my/common-script.js</common-script>

Optional

Default: ${prefix}/share/mediatomb/js/common.js, where ${prefix} is
your installation prefix directory.

Points to the so called common script - think of it as a custom library
of js helper functions, functions added there can be used in your
import and in your playlist scripts. For more details read doc/
scripting.txt

o <playlist-script create-link="yes">/path/to/my/playlist-script.js</playlist-script>

Optional

Default: ${prefix}/share/mediatomb/js/playlists.js, where ${prefix} is
your installation prefix directory.

Points to the script that is parsing various playlists, by default
parsing of pls and m3u playlists is implemented, however the script can
be adapted to parse almost any kind of text based playlist. For more
details read doc/scripting.txt

- create-link=...

Optional

Default: yes

Links the playlist to the virtual container which contains the
expanded playlist items. This means, that if the actual playlist
file is removed from the database, the virtual container
corresponding to the playlist will also be removed.

* <magic-file>/path/to/my/magic-file</magic-file>

Optional

Default: System default

Specifies an alternative file for filemagic, containing mime type
information.

* <autoscan use-inotify="auto">

Optional

Specifies a list of default autoscan directories.

This section defines persistent autoscan directories. It is also possible
to define autoscan directories in the UI, the difference is that autoscan
directories that are defined via the config file can not be removed in the
UI. Even if the directory gets removed on disk, the server will try to
monitor the specified location and will re add the removed directory if it
becomes available/gets created again.

o use-inotify=...

Optional

Default: auto

Specifies if the inotify autoscan feature should be enabled. The
default value is "auto", which means that availability of inotify
support on the system will be detected automatically, it will then be
used if available. Setting the option to 'no' will disable inotify even
if it is available. Allowed values: "yes", "no", "auto"

Child tags:

o <directory location="/media" mode="timed" interval="3600"
level="full" recursive="no" hidden-files="no"/>
<directory location="/audio" mode="inotify"
recursive="yes" hidden-files="no"/>
...

Optional

Defines an autoscan directory and it's parameters.

The attributes specify various autoscan options:

- location=...

Required

Absolute path to the directory that shall be monitored.

- mode=...

Required

Scan mode, currently "inotify" and "timed" are supported. Timed
mode rescans the given directory in specified intervals, inotify
mode uses the kernel inotify mechanism to watch for filesystem
events.

- interval=...

Required for "timed" mode

Scan interval in seconds.

- level=...

Required for "timed" mode

Either "full" or "basic". Basic mode will only check if any files
have been added or were deleted from the monitored directory, full
mode will remember the last modification time and re add the media
that has changed. Full mode might be useful when you want to
monitor changes in the media, like id3 tags and alike.

- recursive=...

Required

Values of "yes" or "no" are allowed, specifies if autoscan shall
monitor the given directory including all sub directories.

- hidden-files=...

Optional

Default: value specified in <import hidden-files=""/>

Allowed values: "yes" or "no", process hidden files, overrides the
hidden-files value in the <import/> tag.

* <mappings>

Optional

Defines various mapping options for importing media, currently two
subsections are supported.

This section defines mime type and upnp:class mappings, it is vital if
filemagic is not available - in this case media type auto detection will
fail and you will have to set the mime types manually by matching the file
extension. It is also helpful if you want to override auto detected mime
types or simply skip filemagic processing for known file types.

o <extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no" case-sensitive="no">

Optional

This section holds the file name extension to mime type mappings.

Attributes:

- ignore-unknown=...

Optional

Default: no

If ignore-unknown is set to "yes", then only the extensions that
are listed in this section are imported.

- case-sensitive=...

Optional

Default: no

Specifies if extensions listed in this section are case sensitive,
allowed values are "yes" or "no".

Child tags:

- <map from="mp3" to="audio/mpeg"/>

Optional

Specifies a mapping from a certain file name extension (everything
after the last dot ".") to mime type.

Note:

this improves the import speed, because invoking libmagic to
discover the right mime type of a file is omitted for files
with extensions listed here.

Note:

extension is case sensitive, this will probably need to be
fixed.

o <mimetype-upnpclass>

Optional

This section holds the mime type to upnp:class mappings.

Child tags:

- <map from="audio/*" to="object.item.audioItem.musicTrack"/>

Optional

Specifies a mapping from a certain mime type to upnp:class in the
Content Directory. The mime type can either be entered explicitly
"audio/mpeg" or using a wildcard after the slash "audio/*". The
values of "from" and "to" attributes are case sensitive.

o <mimetype-contenttype>

Optional

This section makes sure that the server knows about remapped mimetypes
and still extracts the metadata correctly. For example, we know that
id3lib can only handle mp3 files, the default mimetype of mp3 content
is audio/mpeg. If the user remaps mp3 files to a different mimetype, we
must know about it so we can still pass this item to id3lib for
metadata extraction.

Note:

if this section is not present in your config file, the defaults
will be filled in automatically. However, if you add an empty tag,
without defining the following <treat> tags, the server will assume
that you want to have an empty list and no files will be process by
the metadata handler.

- <treat mimetype="audio/mpeg" as="mp3"/>

Optional

Tells the server what content the specified mimetype actually is.

Note:

it makes no sense to define 'as' values that are not below, the
server only needs to know the content type of the ones
specified, otherwise it does not matter.

The 'as' attribute can have following values:

* mp3

Default mimetype: audio/mpeg

The content is an mp3 file and should be processed by either
id3lib or taglib (if available).

* ogg

Default mimetype: application/ogg

The content is an ogg file and should be processed by taglib
(if available).

* flac

Default mimetype: audio/x-flac

The content is a flac file and should be processed by taglib
(if available).

* jpg

Default mimetype: image/jpeg

The content is a jpeg image and should be processed by libexif
(if available).

* playlist

Default mimetype: audio/x-mpegurl or audio/x-scpls

The content is a playlist and should be processed by the
playlist parser script.

* pcm

Default mimetype: audio/L16 or audio/x-wav

The content is a PCM file.

* avi

Default mimetype: video/x-msvideo

The content is an AVI container, FourCC extraction will be
attempted.

* <library-options>

Optional

This section holds options for the various supported import libraries, it
is useful in conjunction with virtual container scripting.

UPnP defines certain tags to pass along metadata of the media (like title,
artist, year, etc.), however some media provides more metadata and exceeds
the scope of UPnP. This additional metadata can be used to fine tune the
server layout, it allows the user to create a more complex container
structure using a customized import script. The metadata that can be
extracted depends on the library, currently we support libebexif and
libextractor, the libraries provide a default set of keys that can be
passed in the options below. The data according to those keys will the be
extracted from the media and imported into the database along with the
item. When processing the item, the import script will have full access to
the gathered metadata, thus allowing the user to organize the data with the
use of the extracted information. A practical example would be: if have
more than one digital camera in your family you could extract the camera
model from the Exif tags and sort your photos in a structure of your
choice, like:

Photos/MyCamera1/All Photos

Photos/MyCamera1/Date

Photos/MyCamera2/All Photos

Photos/MyCamera2/Date

etc.

Child tags:

o <libexif>

Optional

Options for the exif library.

Child tags:

- <auxdata>

Optional

Currently only adding keywords to auxdata is supported. For a list
of keywords/tags see the libexif documentation. Auxdata can be read
by the import java script to gain more control over the media
structure.

Child tags:

* <add-data tag="keyword1"/>
<add-data tag="keyword2"/>
...

Optional

If the library was able to extract the data according to the
given keyword, it will be added to auxdata. You can then use
that data in your import scripts.

A sample configuration for the example described above would be:

o <id3>

Optional

These options apply to id3lib or taglib libraries.

Child tags:

- <auxdata>

Optional

Currently only adding keywords to auxdata is supported. The
keywords are those defined in the id3 specification, we do not
perform any extra checking, so you could try to use any string as a
keyword - if it does not exist in the tag nothing bad will happen.

Here is a list of possible keywords:

TALB, TBPM, TCOM, TCON, TCOP, TDAT, TDLY, TENC, TEXT, TFLT, TIME,
TIT1, TIT2, TIT3, TKEY, TLAN, TLEN, TMED, TOAL, TOFN, TOLY, TOPE,
TORY, TOWN, TPE1, TPE2, TPE3, TPE4, TPOS, TPUB, TRCK, TRDA, TRSN,
TRSO, TSIZ, TSRC, TSSE, TYER, TXXX

Child tags:

* <add-data tag="TCOM"/>
<add-data tag="TENC"/>
...

Optional

If the library was able to extract the data according to the
given keyword, it will be added to auxdata. You can then use
that data in your import scripts.

A sample configuration for the example described above would be:

o <libextractor>

Optional

Options for the extractor library.

Child tags:

- <auxdata>

Optional

Currently only adding keywords to auxdata is supported. For a list
of keywords/tags see the libextractor documentation.

Child tags:

* <add-data tag="keyword1"/>
<add-data tag="keyword2"/>
...

Optional

If the library was able to extract the data according to the
given keyword, it will be added to auxdata. You can then use
that data in your import scripts.

6.2.1. Online Content Settings

This section resides under import and defines options for various supported
online services.

<online-content fetch-buffer-size="262144" fetch-buffer-fill-size="0">

Optional

This tag defines the online content section.

Attributes:

* fetch-buffer-size=...

Optional

Default: 262144

Often, online content can be directly accessed by the player - we will just
give it the URL. However, sometimes it may be necessary to proxy the
content through MediaTomb. This setting defines the buffer size in bytes,
that will be used when fetching content from the web. The value must not be
less than allowed by the curl library (usually 16384 bytes).

* fetch-buffer-fill-size=...

Optional

Default: 0 (disabled)

This setting allows to prebuffer a certain amount of data, given in bytes,
before sending it to the player, this should ensure a constant data flow in
case of slow connections. Usually this setting is not needed, because most
players will anyway have some kind of buffering, however if the connection
is particularly slow you may want to try enable this setting.

Below are the settings for supported services.

6.3. Transcoding Settings

The transcoding section allows to define ways on how to transcode content.

Optional

This tag defines the transcoding section.

Attributes:

* enabled=...

Optional

Default: yes

This attribute defines if transcoding is enabled as a whole, possible
values are "yes" or "no".

* fetch-buffer-size=...

Optional

Default: 262144

In case you have transcoders that can not handle online content directly
(see the accept-url parameter below), it is possible to put the transcoder
between two FIFOs, in this case MediaTomb will fetch the online content.
This setting defines the buffer size in bytes, that will be used when
fetching content from the web. The value must not be less than allowed by
the curl library (usually 16384 bytes).

* fetch-buffer-fill-size=...

Optional

Default: 0 (disabled)

This setting allows to prebuffer a certain amount of data before sending it
to the transcoder, this should ensure a constant data flow in case of slow
connections. Usually this setting is not needed, because most transcoders
will just patiently wait for data and we anyway buffer on the output end.
However, we observed that ffmpeg will fail to transcode flv files if it
encounters buffer underruns - this setting helps to avoid this situation.

Child tags:

* <mimetype-profile-mappings>

The mime type to profile mappings define which mime type is handled by
which profile.

Different mime types can map to the same profile in case that the
transcoder in use supports various input formats. The same mime type can
also map to several profiles, in this case multiple resources in the XML
will be generated, allowing the player to decide which one to take.

The mappings under mimetype-profile are defined in the following manner:

o <transcode mimetype="audio/x-flac" using="oggflac-pcm"/>

Optional

In this example we want to transcode our flac audio files (they have
the mimetype audio/x-flac) using the "oggflac-pcm" profile which is
defined below.

- mimetype=...

Selects the mime type of the source media that should be
transcoded.

- using=...

Selects the transcoding profile that will handle the mime type
above. Information on how to define transcoding profiles can be
found below.

* <profiles>

This section defines the various transcoding profiles.

o <profile name="oggflag-pcm" enabled="yes" type="external">

Optional

Definition of a transcoding profile.

- name=...

Required

Name of the transcoding profile, this is the name that is specified
in the mime type to profile mappings.

- enabled=...

Required

Enables or disables the profile, allowed values are "yes" or "no".

- type=...

Required

Defines the profile type, currently only "external" is supported,
this will change in the future.

* <mimetype>audio/x-wav</mimetype>

Required

Defines the mime type of the transcoding result (i.e. of the
transcoded stream). In the above example we transcode to PCM.

* <accept-url>yes</accept-url>

Optional

Default: yes

Some transcoders are able to handle non local content, i.e.
instead giving a local file name you can pass an URL to the
transcoder. However, some transcoders can only deal with local
files, for this case set the value to "no".

* <first-resource>no</first-resource>

Optional

Default: no

It is possible to offer more than one resource in the browse
result, a good player implementation will go through all
resources and pick the one that it can handle best.
Unfortunately most players only look at the first resource and
ignore the rest. When you add a transcoding profile for a
particular media type it will show up as an additional resource
in the browse result, using this parameter you can make sure
that the transcoded resource appears first in the list.

Note:

if more than one transcoding profile is applied on one
source media type (i.e. you transcode an OGG file to MP3
and to PCM), and the first-resource parameter is specified
in both profiles, then the resource positions are
undefined.

* <hide-original-resource>no</hide-original-resource>

Optional

Default: no

This parameter will hide the resource of the original media
when sending the browse result to the player, this can be
useful if your device gets confused by multiple resources and
allows you to send only the transcoded one.

* <accept-ogg-theora>no</accept-org-theora>

Optional

Default: no

As you may know, OGG is just a container, the content could be
Vorbis or Theora while the mime type is "application/ogg". For
transcoding we need to identify if we are dealing with audio or
video content, specifying yes in this tag in the profile will
make sure that only OGG files containing Theora will be
processed.

* <avi-fourcc-list mode="ignore">

Optional

Default: disabled

This option allows to specify a particular list of AVI fourcc
strings that can be either set to be ignored or processed by
the profile.

Note:

this option has no effect on non AVI content.

o mode=...

Required

Specifies how the list should be handled by the transcoding
engine, possible values are:

- "disabled"

The option is completely disabled, fourcc list is not
being processed.

- "process"

Only the fourcc strings that are listed will be
processed by the transcoding profile, AVI files with
other fourcc strings will be ignored. Setting this is
useful if you want to transcode only some specific
fourcc's and not transcode the rest.

- "ignore"

The fourcc strings listed will not be transcoded, all
other codecs will be transcoded. Setting this might be
useful if you want to prevent a limited number of
codecs from being transcoded, but want to apply
transcoding on the rest (i.e. - do not transcode divx
and xvid, but want to transcode mjpg and whatever else
might be in the AVI container).

The list of fourcc strings is enclosed in the avi-fourcc-list
section:

o <fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>

etc...

* <agent command="ogg123" arguments="-d wav -f %out %in/>

Required

Defines the transcoding agent and the parameters, in the
example above we use ogg123 to convert ogg or flac to wav.

o command=...

Required

Defines the transcoder binary that will be executed by
MediaTomb upon a transcode request, the binary must be in
$PATH. It is very important that the transcoder is capable
of writing the output to a FIFO, some applications, for
example ffmpeg, have problems with that. The command line
arguments are specified separately (see below).

o arguments=...

Required

Specifies the command line arguments that will be given to
the transcoder application upon execution. There are two
special tokens:

%in
%out

Those tokens get substituted by the input file name and the
output FIFO name before execution.

* <buffer size="1048576" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="262144"/>

Required

These settings help you to achieve a smooth playback of
transcoded media. The actual values need to be tuned and depend
on the speed of your system. The general idea is to buffer the
data before sending it out to the player, it is also possible
to delay first playback until the buffer is filled to a certain
amount. The prefill should give you enough space to overcome
some high bitrate scenes in case your system can not transcode
them in real time.

o size=...

Required

Size of the buffer in bytes.

o chunk-size=...

Required

Size of chunks in bytes, that are read by the buffer from
the transcoder. Smaller chunks will produce a more constant
buffer fill ratio, however too small chunks may slow things
down.

o fill-size=...

Required

Initial fill size - number of bytes that have to be in the
buffer before the first read (i.e. before sending the data
to the player for the first time). Set this to 0 (zero) if
you want to disable prefilling.

* <resolution>320x240</resolution>

Optional

Allows you to tell the resolution of the transcoded media to
your player. This may be helpful if you want to generate
thumbnails for your photos, or if your player has the ability
to pick video streams in a particular resolution. Of course the
setting should match the real resolution of the transcoded
media.

* <thumbnail>yes</thumbnail>

Optional

Note:

this is an experimental option, the implementation will be
refined in the future releases.

This is a special option which was added for the PS3 users. If
the resolution option (see above) was set, then, depending on
the resolution an special DLNA tag will be added, marking the
resource as a thumbnail. This is useful if you have a
transcoding script that extracts an image out of the video and
presents it as a thumbnail.

Use the option with caution, no extra checking is being done if
the resulting mimetype represents an image, also, it is will
only work if the output of the profile is a JPG image.

7. Supported Devices

Attention Hardware Manufacturers:

If you want to improve compatibility between MediaTomb and your renderer device
or if you are interested in a port of MediaTomb for your NAS device please
e-mail to: <contact at mediatomb dot cc>

7.1. MediaRenderers

MediaTomb supports all UPnP compliant MediaRenderers, however there can always
be various problems that depend on the particular device implementation. We
always try to implement workarounds to compensate for failures and limitations
of various renderers.

This is the list of client devices that MediaTomb has been tested with and that
are known to work. Please drop us a mail if you are using MediaTomb with a
device that is not in the list, report any success and failure. We will try to
fix the issues and will add the device to the list.

7.1.1. Acer

* AT3705-MGW

7.1.2. Conceptronic

* C54WMP

7.1.3. Denon

* AVR 4306

7.1.4. D-Link

* DSM-320

* DSM-320RD

* DSM-510

* DSM-520

Some additional settings in MediaTomb configuration are required to enable
special features for the DSM renderers. If you have a DSM-320 and are
experiencing problems during AVI playback, add the following to the server
section of your config.xml:

<custom-http-headers>
<add header="X-User-Agent: redsonic"/>
</custom-http-headers>

Further, the DSM-320 behaves differently if it thinks that it is dealing with
the D-Link server. Add the following to the server section of your
configuration to enable srt subtitle support:

<manufacturerURL>redsonic.com</manufacturerURL>
<modelNumber>105</modelNumber>

It is still being investigated, but we were able to get subtitles working with
a U.S. DSM-320 unit running firmware version 1.09

Also, the DSM-510 (probably also valid for other models) will only play avi
files if the mimetype is set to video/avi, you may want to add a mapping for
that to the extension-mimetype section in your config.xml:

7.1.5. Freecom

* MusicPal

7.1.6. Haeger

* OnAir (also known as BT Internet Radio)

7.1.7. HP

* MediaSmart TV

Users reported that after a firmwre upgrade the device stopped working
properly. It seems that it does not sue the UPnP Browse action anymore, but now
uses the optional Search action which is not implemented in MediaTomb.

7.1.8. I-O Data

* AVeL LinkPlayer2 AVLP2/DVDLA

7.1.9. Linksys

* WMLS11B (Wireless-B Music System)

* KiSS 1600

7.1.10. NeoDigits

* HELIOS X3000

7.1.11. Netgear

* EVA700

7.1.12. Philips

* Streamium SL-300i

* Streamium SL-400i

* Streamium MX-6000i

* SLA-5500

* SLA-5520

7.1.13. Pinnacle

* ShowCenter 200

* SoundBridge

7.1.14. Pioneer

* BDP-HD50-K

* BDP-94HD

7.1.15. Roku

* SoundBridge M1001

* SoundBridge M2000

7.1.16. Siemens

* Gigaset M740AV

7.1.17. Sony

* Playstation 3

Firmware 1.80 introduces UPnP/DLNA support, add the following to the <server>
section of your configuration file to enable MediaTomb PS3 compatibility:

7.1.18. T+A

* T+A Music Player

7.1.19. Telegent

* TG100

The TG100 client has a problem browsing containers, where item titles exceed
101 characters. We implemented a server-side workaround which allows you to
limit the lengths of all titles and descriptions. Use the following settings in
the <server> section of your configuration file:

<upnp-string-limit>101</upnp-string-limit>

7.1.20. TerraTec

* NOXON iRadio

* NOXON 2 Audio

7.1.21. ZyXEL

* DMA-1000

Some users reported problems where the DMA will show an error "Failed to
retrieve list" and the DMA disconnecting from the server. Incresing the alive
interval seems to solve the problem - add the following option to the <server>
section of your configuration file:

Additionally, the DMA expects that avi files are serverd with the mime type of
video/avi, so add the following to the <extensoin-mimetype> section in your
configuration file:

7.2. Network Attached Storage Devices

We provide a bitbake metadata file for the OpenEmbedded environment, it allows
to easily cross compile MediaTomb for various platforms. We have successfully
tested MediaTomb on ARM and MIPSel based devices, so it should be possible to
install and run the server on various Linux based NAS products that are
available on the market.

So far two devices are shipped with a preinstalled version of MediaTomb,
community firmware versions are available for the rest.

7.2.1. Buffalo

* KuroBox-HG

* LinkStation

7.2.2. Excito

* Bubba Mini Server (preinstalled)

7.2.3. Iomega

* StorCenter (preinstalled)

7.2.4. Linksys

* NSLU2

7.2.5. Maxtor

* Shared Storage

7.2.6. Western Digital

* MyBook

8. Running The Server

When you run MediaTomb for the first time a default configuration will be
created in the ~/.mediatomb directory. If you are using the sqlite database no
further intervention is necessary, if you are using MySQL you will have to make
some adjustments (see Configuration section for more details). To start the
server simply run "mediatomb" from the console, to shutdown cleanly press
Ctrl-C. At start up MediaTomb will print a link to the web UI.

Note:

Internet Explorer support is limited and not yet finished. It is very
difficult to support this browser because of a huge number of bugs in its
javascript implementation. If you don't believe us - just visit http://
selfhtml.org/ and see how often IE is mentioned in not following the specs
or simply not working with certain functions and features. We recommend
Firefox.

If you want to run a second server from the same PC, make sure to use a
different configuration file with a different udn and a different database.

After server launch the bookmark file is created in the ~/.mediatomb directory.
You now can manually add the bookmark ~/.mediatomb/mediatomb.html in your
browser. This will redirect you to the UI if the server is running.

Assuming that you enabled the UI, you should now be able to get around quite
easily.

We also support the daemon mode which allows to start the server in background,
the --user and --group parameters should be used to run the server under an
unprivileged account. A script for starting/stopping the server is provided.

9. Legal

THIS SOFTWARE COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

9.1. Copyright

Gena Batyan <bgeradz at mediatomb dot cc>

Sergey Bostandzhyan <jin at mediatomb dot cc>

Gena Batyan <bgeradz at mediatomb dot cc>

Sergey Bostandzhyan <jin at mediatomb dot cc>

Leonhard Wimmer <leo at mediatomb dot cc>

9.2. License

MediaTomb is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free
Software Foundation. MediaTomb is distributed in the hope that it will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public
License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General
Public License version 2 along with MediaTomb; if not, write to the Free
Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301,
USA.

10. Acknowledgments

We are using the following code in our tree:

* uuid from E2fsprogs 1.35 under GNU GPL, Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998
Theodore Ts'o. <tytso at mit dot edu> Some functions from the UPnP SDK were
conflicting with libuuid, so we had to take the sources in and do some
renaming.

* md5 javascript implementation distributed under BSD License, Copyright (c)
Paul Johnston 1999 - 2002. http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5

* Prototype JavaScript Framework http://www.prototypejs.org/ (c) 2005-2007
Sam Stephenson, MIT-style license.

* (heavily modified version of) NanoTree http://nanotree.sourceforge.net/ (c)
2003 (?) Martin Mouritzen <martin at nano dot dk>; LGPL

* IE PNG fix from http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavior.html

* tombupnp is based on pupnp (http://pupnp.sf.net) which is based on libupnp
(http://upnp.sf.net), originally distributed under the BSD license,
Copyright (c) 2000-2003 Intel Corporation. Note that all changes to libupnp
/pupnp code that were made by the MediaTomb team are covered by the LGPL
license.

* ACX_PTHREAD autoconf script http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/
acx_pthread.html (c) 2006 Steven G. Johnson <stevenj at alum dot mit dot
edu>

* The the Inotify::nextEvent() function is based on code from the inotify
tools package, http://inotify-tools.sf.net/, distributed under GPL v2, (c)
Rohan McGovern <rohan at mcgovern dot id dot au>

11. Contributions

* Initial version of the MediaTomb start up script was contributed by Iain
Lea <iain at bricbrac dot de>

* TagLib support patch was contributed by Benhur Stein <benhur.stein at gmail
dot com>

* ffmpeg metadata handler was contributed by Ingo Preiml <ipreiml at edu dot
uni-klu dot ac dot at>

* ID3 keyword extraction patch was contributed by Gabriel Burca
<gburca-mediatomb at ebixio dot com>

* tombupnp is kept in sync with the latest pupnp (http://pupnp.sf.net/)
patches, see documentation in the tombupnp directory