Enabling Mediatomb on Fedora 13

I have a HUGE music collection that I’ve taken the time to digitize, so it was bugging me that I couldn’t listen to it on my sound system on the first floor.  When I raised the volume on my computer speakers I just ended up hearing a ton of bass.  So I took a look around the net and it seems that mediatomb is the program to use.  It was in the Fedora repos or maybe the RPMFusion repos.  It’s pretty easy.  You run it as your user (not root) and it creates a config file.  All you need to do is tweak that file to have it say:

<protocolInfo extend="yes"/>

instead of

<protocolInfo extend="no"/> .

Then you go to the website it tells you about in the command line and tell it what directory you want to share. Then, there’s just one last thing that was driving me crazy. The Playstation can’t see it! And no one knew why. After a lot of trial and error, I figured out it was the Fedora firewall that was blocking access!  Unintuitively, you don’t unblock the port it tells you about in the command line.  Or maybe you do, but that’s not enough by its own.  You also need to tell the firewall to have a few other ports open.  You need UDP ports ?53486 and 1900 open as well.  Then, like magic, it will appear and you can play all the music you want.  Yay!  Now I don’t need my wife’s iPod (with a failing battery) to listen to all my tunes.  I think that mediatomb can also convert anything that’s not MP3 or MP4, but I haven’t worried about that just yet.

• Linux

• Command-Line
• Fedora-13
• Firewall
• Mediatomb
• Ports