Linux based Media Sever?
 

hi,

can anyon tell me which is tha best media server that can i make in linux server?
im using windos 2008 media server
now i've to make server on linux..

I can recommend XBMC, it runs very well on my Raspberry Pi.

XBMC is an excellent client but it may not be the best media server.

But then again, best is a subjective term.

I'd suggest to have a look at Universal Media Server as it is the most full featured of GPL'd servers as far as I can tell.

Note that I've never actually needed a media server myself as vlc works fine as a stand-alone media player on my regular box and XBMC makes a fine stand-alone media centre on my other box.

interesting, i know i posted to this, did you make a duplicate thread? either way ill post it again:

I have a CentOS server that acts as both my NFS server (thats file server for you MS types) and a Plex Media server.

All of the workstations in the house use Plex to access the movies/TV shows I have on my server, but my RPI, as mentioned above, uses XMBC via RaspBMC.

I am replacing my RPi with WD TV due to hardware issues on my RPi and CPU performance issues that have yet to be resolved by the maintainers of RaspBMC.

Also a few things of note:

1. XMBC will use what ever codec's you have installed on the system running, not on the file server. for a RPi, that does mean spending a little bit of extra money (approx $2-$3 twice) for the 2 extra codec's required to run some of the proprietary codecs that are not built into the RPi hardware. Not a huge investment and well worth it.

2. Plex will use only what codecs comes built into Plex no matter what you have on the server or the player system. This means that some formats will NEVER work under Plex. This does not matter what OS plex is running on. It is a universal issue with Plex. You can use something like handbrake to re-encode the file to get around this. It just takes time.

it does dlna pretty well. although i dont have any experience with any other dlna server.

Can I rip DVD's on the RPi to store on my file/media server? I have a RPi and a USB DVD/Bluray reader/writer. I've ripped all my cd's to mp3 and share them over my network via miniDLNA and have a bluray player that will playback from that. If I install one of the XMBC distros on the Pi.

You should make a new thread for this as it's a different question to the one being asked here. I'm not certain if any ripping software has been ported to the RPi yet, but I doubt it. Ripping works best on a proper desktop/laptop. I find ogmrip works well for backing up your DVD collection to hard disk.

Its possible, but yuck, a R-Pi for ripping DVDS is going to be slow, slow, slow, s l o w.

Again that depends on the distro you install on your RPi, if you install RaspBMC, then answer is NO, not out of the box. You will have to hope they included the cdrtools in their repositories, keeping in mind that RaspBMC is a Debian fork for RPi as is the "official" Raspian distro.

yeah as long as you can install something like mencoder/vlc you will be able to rp whatever you want to whatever format you want.

I got Handbrake working on my server now so I can rip there.

I'm running it as a very simple media server. I simply have music, photos, and videos shares via NFS, SAMBA and miniDLNA. DLNA is a simply media serving protocol which many client apps and set top boxes support. So I stream my media to a bluray player that supports DLNA.