Sharing media on Ubuntu (to PS3 and probably Wii and XBox as well)

Last week my PC blew up, this ended up a big excuse for me to attempt to change most of my computing to Linux. Anyone that has switched to Linux knows that it needs to be a gradual process, unfortunately I had to spend C$100 on a Windows 7 license because I still need it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but paying for my OS actually hurts me. Anyway, today I want to share some of my videos and music on my network, the idea is to play my files on my PS3 and I'm wondering how to do that outside of Windows (which was not all that great via Windows Vista anyway).

I started by downloading an app from the repositories called Mediatomb which you can also get via the terminal by typing:

$ sudo apt-get install mediatomb

First thing you have to do is enable sharing to your system, which in my case is a PS3. This is done via the command:

$ sudo gedit ~/.mediatomb/config.xml

There you will want to find a line with:

<protocolInfo extend="no"/>

...now change that "no" to a "yes"... now look for a line saying

<mappings> <extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no">

and add these two lines into the section below it, there will be a suggestion to just uncomment it but you can just add them:

<map from="avi" to="video/x-divx"/>

<map from="divx" to="video/x-divx"/>

Then you actually need to run it from the terminal by typing:

$ sudo mediatomb

This should give you an ip address with a port number (like http://192.168.1.101:49155/), so copy this and access it through your browser. Now you can navigate through your files and folders (filessystem), and anything you would like to share with your PS3, simply click on the + sign. Once you have done that to all the files you want to share you may go back to the "database" option and see what you are sharing over you LAN.

For some reason I get 2 options for Mediatomb on my PS3, and the second one tends to have a "Directories" folder that I can access and use my media. I hope this helps.