Remote media management solution?

bardo · 2010-09-15 11:06:00

Hi guys,
with the recent addition of an arch-based headless NAS in my home network I'm finally able to free some space in my local disks (mainly one laptop and two desktop). I'm still trying to figure out what's the best solution for media management, since most of the programs I use aren't network-aware and tend to go crazy when confronted with "moving" resources.

The main contents I want to manage include pictures (many thousands, hi-res), music (mainly high quality mp3s, directly ripped from cd) and videos (camera-taken fullhd videos on which I sometimes need to do some editing). The server already exports NFS and SMB shares, I can install anything on it. On my clients I mainly use GTK-based environments, but I have no problems with Qt. I'd prefer not to use the command line, even though I'm not scared of it.

Music is my main concern, I'm looking for two things: being able to stream music to my local computer and playing it from the server. Ideally I'd use only one player that supports both methods. Server-side, I thought about MPD, I think it sucks but I didn't find anything better and I'm open to suggestions. Same goes for client-side music, at the moment I have mt-daapd installed and running. It's pretty nice, but it doesn't allow me to do things like ratings, play counts and tag management.
Using the NFS share is out of the question, because then the files would be seen as local, and the player would go crazy when no finding them because I moved to another network/lost my connection.

For pictures I was looking for something like shotwell, but I fear the moment I'll open it and it won't find the expected share, just like the music player.

Movies are the smallest problem. For editing I'd probably need to have a local copy anyway, otherwise it would take too much time to work. But for watching, a streaming solution could be nice, even though I can live with xine on NFS, performances are pretty decent.

So what's your experience? Do you have any suggestions on the matter?

kittykatt · 2010-09-15 14:55:40

As far as streaming music goes, MPD is the best solution in my opinion. It's built to be run from a server environment. It has a specific option in it's config file to output to an HTTP stream which you can tune into using pretty much ANY player that can open a stream. The only problem is finding a way to listen to the stream AND control it at the same time. What I do is just map my multimedia keys to "mpc (toggle|next|prev|stop)" and the mpc client is connected to the server's MPD instance, controlling it instead of the local instance.

What I also do is forward the http port that the stream is on via my router so that I can listen to the stream ANYWHERE, so long as I'm connected to the internet.

Read up some more on the wiki: http://mpd.wikia.com

As far as pictures and videos go, I have no experience with that personally, so I'm not really sure where to point you there.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-15 11:06:00

Remote media management solution?

#2 2010-09-15 14:55:40

Re: Remote media management solution?

Board footer