for keeping track of my digital experiments

I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past couple of months (on and off) to stream content from my home Linux servers to several DirecTV HR20-700’s. This latest attempt, actually worked and I wanted to document my exact setup as no other literature has done.

Stuff you need:

1. Debian 5 installed on a computer with ~ 1GHZ CPU, 256MB RAM, hard drive with media content on it
2. reliable Internet connection
3. a DirecTV HR2x

 
 
Here are the exact commands you need to run, I’ll explain them later.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get -y install screen vlc vorbis-tools mpg123 ffmpeg unzip subversion build-essential autoconf automake curl libexpat-ocaml-dev libsqlite3-dev libcurl-ocaml-dev libid3-3.8.3-dev libtagc0-dev libavformat-dev libexif-dev
svn co https://svn.mediatomb.cc/svnroot/mediatomb/trunk/mediatomb mediatomb
cd mediatomb
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install
cd
wget http://vraidsys.com/article-includes/mediatomb.zip
mv mediatomb.zip /etc/
cd /etc/
unzip mediatomb.zip
rm mediatomb.zip
mkdir /var/lib/mediatomb
chmod -R 777 /var/lib/mediatomb/
cd
mv /etc/mediatomb/mediatomb /etc/init.d/
vi /etc/init.d/mediatomb < -- change line so ethX reads eth0, eth1, or whatever your LAN network interface card is assigned to
chmod +x /etc/init.d/mediatomb
update-rc.d mediatomb defaults

The idea is that the default MediaTomb install found in the repos (version 11) doesn’t support transcoding quite right for the DirecTV HR2x. So we do an install from the repos for a bunch of dependencies for the latest code (version 12) that we then checkout from the project SVN repo. A new configuration script that I built is downloaded and installed. It has support for transcoding ogg, mp3, flac, flv, avi, mkv, mov, and a few other formats (pretty easy to add support for other formats check out –> http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/transcoding:transcoding#directv_hr2x_transcoding).

MediaTomb will be automatically started on boot. It can also be stopped and started manually by: /etc/init.d/mediatomb stop or /etc/init.d/mediatomb start.

You can then go to the webui of MediaTomb and update your media library. –> http://hostname:49152/

Last weekend I was playing around with running nginx, SSH, vsFTPd, and MediaTomb on this 1GHZ, 512MB RAM machine that I jacked into my network. So let me get the obvious things out of the way first:

• SSH for administering
• vsFTPd for getting files onto the media server
• nginx for serving the media files externally to the WAN

What is this MediaTomb you may ask? It is a DLNA/Media UPnP server daemon, that is administered via a sleek javascript front end, and run by a fast C back end (for nix machines). There were issues though, when I tried accessing it from the new DirecTV set top boxes that have network/internet support built in. According to my dad, who works for DirecTV, the boxes are supposed to be able to access DLNA compliant content. It is not an advertised feature, just an “under development” feature. He says the only reason that ethernet ports are on the set top boxes in the first place is for VOD content, served by Limelight Networks. In the future, the DLNA support will probably be phased out, but for now I guess I’ll get to have some fun.