MediaTomb revisited

As I mentioned before, I keep coming back to MediaTomb, playing with it for a few hours and then going back to uShare.  Not this time.  For the last couple of days I’ve been reading a lot more on the MediaTomb wiki, particularly the scripting pages.

I’m not sure why it wasn’t obvious to me before, but somehow I’d managed to keep overlooking those pages.  Using the scripting I was able to create a hierarchy almost exactly what I wanted.  I just wish there was an option to prevent the  “PC Directory” from being sent to the renderers.

Building and installing from source, switching the layout from builtin to js and modifying the import.js script is what I needed to do.  Probably not something a Linux novice would want to do, but it wasn’t too bad — once I knew what I had to do.  I think it was the whole “scripting” thing that made me overlook it in the past.

Its still not what I would call speedy, but that doesn’t really matter since I doubt many people will be constantly changing hundreds of files all the time.  As I’ve said before, it is stable, too.

It also solved one of my other problems, too, that of my playlists.  I can now stream the same playlists that my MPD server uses to my Netgear MP101.  I haven’t tried the MediaLounge or the Homepod yet, but will soon.  The only thing I have to do differently is tell MPD to use my MP3 “root” directory as its playlist directory and use relative paths.  MediaTomb parses these playlists fine and allows me to use them on the MP101.  MediaTomb also handles my “internet music” URL’s too, so I can now also point the Netgear to my icecast server and listen to my MPD stream directly.

That now covers almost all of my requirements.  I still need to put it through its paces for the next week or two but I think I may have found a solution that will work.