Daily Cup of Tech

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

The Firefly Media Server is an open-source project to build the best server software to serve digital music to the Roku Soundbridge and iTunes; to be able to serve the widest variety of digital music content over the widest range of devices. Current stable releases have been reported to run on Linux, all the BSDs, Solaris, AIX, and a variety of embedded devices such as the Linksys NSLU2, the Maxtor MSS, and the Buffalo Linkstation, to name but a few.

There are a number of features that differentiate Firefly Media Server from those other servers, and here is a partial list:

• Support for running on unix/POSIX platforms
• Support for Windows (beta versions)
• Support for Mac OSX (beta versions)
• Support for on-the-fly transcoding of OGG, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and WMA (beta versions)
• Web-based configuration
• Support for user-created smart playlists (beta versions)
• Integrates with iTunes library including reading playlists
• Supports serving streaming radio stations

Meedio is a very powerful and configurable Home Theatre front-end for your PC. It was first known as MyHTPC, then Meedio, and finally Yahoo! Go4TV as freeware. Official releases have since ceased and the official forums abandoned. The vibrant developer community have moved here and the activity has only increased. We now have over 450 freeware plugins for Meedio, as well as numberous other projects.

GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system than works on any Pentium-class x86 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirement. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Despite his tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with a complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind of audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.

GeeXboX also comes with a complete toolchain that allows developers adding easily extra packages and features but that might also be used to give birth to many dedicated embedded Linux systems.

MediaPortal turns your PC / TV into a very advanced MediaCenter / HTPC. Our software allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community.