Streaming media

[mpankratz]

One of the projects I've been trying to accomplish for a long time is setting one of my old PCs as a streaming media server. Michelle and I have hundreds of CDs in various boxes throughout the house. Finding the one we want to listen to at any given time is near impossible. Keeping the boys from destroying them is also a challenge.

Most recently, I've been investigating a couple of applications. I'm running both of these on Ubuntu 10.04

Zeya (available at http://web.psung.name/zeya/) is a very simple, clean application. It is fairly easy to configure from the command line and "runs in any browser that supports the HTML 5 draft standard technologies— no Flash needed. No Silverlight, no applets, no plugins, no external players." Searching is easy and accomplished either with the built in search function or via the browser search function. Some drawbacks include, no album art, no built-in playlist function (although it will play prebuilt .m3u files). I think we will probably use this application to stream music upstairs to the netbook.

Subsonic (available at http://subsonic.org)is a much more feature rich application. Installation was very easy and configuration is straightforward and simple. Flash is required to play song within the browser. However, you can point an external music player (WinAmp, Zinf, Ryhthmbox, etc) at the server and stream that way. In addition, there is an Adobe AIR application, iPhone/iPad apps, and an app for Android. I'm disappointed that there is no Palm Pre app.

Subsonic also has very good controls for setting up users, creating podcasts, managing uploads, and trans-coding between file formats on the fly. You can also stream video content, but I haven't experimented with that yet. About the only thing I don't like about Subsonic is that you can't create random playlists of more than 50 songs. I'd love to be able to just shuffle through my entire collection, but it it's built in. Perhaps in a future release.

Anyone else have solutions for streaming media at home?