MediaTomb on a Mac Pro running OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

I had been looking at some commercial solutions to stream media from my Mac Pro running OS X 10.5 to my Xbox 360. I had tried Rivet but didn’t have any luck with it. While discussing streaming media solutions with a co-worker, he mentioned that I should try out MediaTomb and get it streaming to my PS3. Luckily I didn’t have to do much to get it installed. I have MacPorts installed so installing MediaTomb was as simple as running:

$ sudo port install mediatomb
—> Fetching mediatomb
—> Verifying checksum(s) for mediatomb
—> Extracting mediatomb
—> Applying patches to mediatomb
—> Configuring mediatomb
—> Building mediatomb with target all
—> Staging mediatomb into destroot
—> Installing mediatomb 0.11.0_0+ffmpeg+sqlite3+taglib
******************************************************
* To use UTF-8 filename and metadata on Mac OS X, add:
* <filesystem-charset>UTF-8-MAC</filesystem-charset>
* <metadata-charset>UTF-8-MAC</metadata-charset>
* to <import> section of ~/.mediatomb/config.xml.
******************************************************
—> Activating mediatomb 0.11.0_0+ffmpeg+sqlite3+taglib
—> Cleaning mediatomb

No problems with the install. Next, I ran it to see what would happen (not much for reading the docs). At the prompt I typed:

$ mediatomb
MediaTomb UPnP Server version 0.11.0 – http://mediatomb.cc/
===============================================================================
Copyright 2005-2008 Gena Batsyan, Sergey Bostandzhyan, Leonhard Wimmer.
MediaTomb is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License version 2
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: MediaTomb configuration was created in: /my/home/dir/.mediatomb/config.xml
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Loading configuration from: /my/home/dir/.mediatomb/config.xml
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: UUID generated: d3bafba0-f140-4054-bfcf-1e6e1f0cb97e
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Checking configuration…
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Setting filesystem import charset to US-ASCII
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Setting metadata import charset to US-ASCII
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Setting playlist charset to US-ASCII
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Configuration check succeeded.
2008-11-16 08:15:53 WARNING: Sqlite3 database seems to be corrupt or doesn't exist yet.
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: no sqlite3 backup is available or backup is corrupt. automatically creating database…
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: database created successfully.
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Initialized port: 49152
2008-11-16 08:15:53 INFO: Server bound to: 10.37.129.2
2008-11-16 08:15:54 INFO: MediaTomb Web UI can be reached by following this link:
2008-11-16 08:15:54 INFO: http://10.37.129.2:49152/

Something didn’t quite look right there and then I realized that MediaTomb had started on the wrong interface. My LAN is on 10.254.0.0/16 and the 10.37 net didn’t match that. I quit MediaTomb by hitting CTRL-C and restarted it again by doing:

$ mediatomb -e en0
MediaTomb UPnP Server version 0.11.0 – http://mediatomb.cc/
===============================================================================
Copyright 2005-2008 Gena Batsyan, Sergey Bostandzhyan, Leonhard Wimmer.
MediaTomb is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License version 2
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Loading configuration from: /my/home/dir/.mediatomb/config.xml
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Checking configuration…
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Setting filesystem import charset to US-ASCII
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Setting metadata import charset to US-ASCII
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Setting playlist charset to US-ASCII
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Configuration check succeeded.
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Initialized port: 49152
2008-11-16 08:47:05 INFO: Server bound to: 10.254.1.10
2008-11-16 08:47:06 INFO: MediaTomb Web UI can be reached by following this link:
2008-11-16 08:47:06 INFO: http://10.254.1.10:49152/

Now it has the right IP address. I checked to see if I could browse to it via my browser and the UI came up right away. I could see it scanning my machine for media to serve. Next I turned on the PS3 and went to Video and then selected search for media servers. It didn’t find anything and realized I better check the config.xml in the .mediatomb directory under my home directory. I stopped MediaTomb and went edited the file (with emacs in case you’re wondering). I changed the following under the section (note the number in front indicates the line number):

18 <protocolInfo extend="yes"/><!– For PS3 support change to "yes" –>
60 <map from="avi" to="video/divx"/>

I also found that I could add the following line under the section so that it would bind to the correct interface when it started.

<interface>en0</interface>

I restarted MediaTomb and went back into the PS3 menu. The PS3 still couldn’t find the media server. Doing a “sudo lsof -i -p” on my Mac showed that MediaTomb was running. Next I checked my firewall rules and realized I didn’t have any rules that would allow the PS3 to connect to my Mac. I added the following rules to my script that customizes my ipfw configuration:

# UPnP
$IPFW add 03140 allow tcp from any to any dst-port 49152 in
$IPFW add 03141 allow udp from any to any dst-port 1900 in
$IPFW add 03142 allow tcp from any to any dst-port 1900 in

I re-ran the firewall script and went back to the PS3. There was a new entry under video called “MediaTomb” and I was able to browse and play back media that I had stored on my Mac Pro. All done!

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