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Archive for June 7th, 2007


Posted on June 7, 2007 - by jono

Easy content streaming via applications

When I work from home I mainly sit on my couch, with two small dogs sat with me. On my laptop is 26GB of music, and I listen to it through the crap speakers on my Thinkpad. But, about four feet away is a Playstation 3 plugged into a beefcake surround system. Hmmm, I got thinking and had the thought of streaming my music over the network to the PS3 which could spit said tunes out of aforementioned speakers of beef. I heard that something called uPnP can be used for this, and a recent PS3 firmware update can make this happen.

Speaking to Chris, one of our Canonical sysadmins, he told me about MediaTomb which I installed. This provides a uPnP server, but requires quite a bit of tinkering in config files with their requisite obtuse configuration directives. I only want to share MP3s, so I set MediaTomb off indexing my music collection but alas it did not work. I could see the server on my PS3, and see the artists abd albums but when I try to get to a song and play it, it says Unsupported Data. A bit of Googling late, it seems a number of people have experienced the same problem. I lose.

This is waaaay too hard. One of the most beautiful things about Rhythmbox’s DAAP support is that I just switch it on and my content is shared. Thats it. This is the approach we need for uPnP sharing. Sure, uPnP can share different types of media, but there is no reason why each application type could not stream those specific types of media – Rhythmbox exports music, F-spot exports photos etc. If you wanted a unified server for this, there is no reason why there could not be a gnome-sharing-server that these applications plug in to.

Is anyone working on a solution to this very problem? I would to just tick an option in Rhythmbox and see my content appear on my PS3 via uPnP. Or, am I smoking crack? :D


Posted on June 7, 2007 - by jono

Introduction to Jokosher testing, this Sunday, be there!

With the recent release of Jokosher 0.9 we are begging the Open Source community to test it and provide some valuable feedback that we can use to fix bugs. The problem is that debugging problems and issues to provide feedback for developers can be difficult if you have never done it before. Well, this Sunday you can attend an IRC meeting to give you a simple introduction to testing Jokosher.

Organised by the new *Jokosher Testing Team, the session will cover how to test Jokosher, provide useful debugging information and submit it to the developers. If you are not a coder and really want to help the project, this is an excellent, nay essential way of contributing.

So, head over to #jokosher on Freenode at 4pm UTC on Sunday 10th June 2007. We look forward to seeing you there. :)

More details on the session..