Is it possible to serve up a whole directory or multi directory tree of music or movies via vlc so other computers can look at it at random, the way GameShark's Media Player does with the PS2? I like this idea better than sharing the actual directories, if this option is possible.

Failing that, are there other options?

Thanks in advance!

It shounds like you want uShare. Many distributions have it in their repositories. On Fedora, for example:

yum install ushare

The configuration is trivial... In /etc/ushare.conf, set the shared directories. For example:

USHARE_DIR=/Music,/E-Books/Audio

Start the server, and you can now use almost any streaming UPnP AV client to play any selections that have been shared.

Wow, that looks nice. Can I auto-share the subdirectories that are beneath the top, or do I have to select them? I have a ton of directories full of mp3's.

You just need to specify the top directory/directories; all the subdirectories will be available as well.

Ok, that seems to work!

So how do you get videolan-client to connect as a client to this? Or maybe Xine? I searched for solutions online and apparently no Linux or Windows program is actually "listed" to work with it!

This Wikipedia article lists a number of UPnP clients, including several on Windows. On Linux, you can use any non-UPnP client (like Xine, VLC, Amarok, etc.) with the djmount UPnP AV client.

Ah well, djmount doesn't seem to interface with ushare. Both programs are running now but there's no indication of any ushare in djmount's mounted directory. They simply don't communicate with each other.

Sorry I wasted your time, it's simply not possible to do this yet, I'll come back in about a year when this technology is more mature.

I doing exactly that, using uShare with djmount. Are you using a firewall?

I shut down my firewall completely, and djmount is still not doing it.

What commands did you use?

And even if I get this running, I'd like to be able to keep my firewall up.

You certainly don't need to shutdown your firewall. If you have a firewall, in the /etc/ushare.conf, set:

USHARE_PORT=49200

Then allow your firewall to pass that port to whomever you want (your subnet or the world). For example, with IPTABLES to allow access from subnet 192.168.1.0:

As to why you are not seeing the server with the firewall down, does your distribution include Avahi (the zeroconf service)? Many distributions include this now (for example it is installed and started automatically on Fedora). If not, you need to install and start the avahi-daemon. On Fedora, assuming you removed it:

yum -y install avahi-daemon
chkconfig avahi-daemon on
service avahi-daemon start

Wow, okay, THAT all worked!

djmount now sees my ushare and I can even see uShare in the mount area. Local vlc can see the mount point.

Now for the last piece of the puzzle... how does a remote vlc connect to that?

By the way when this is all done, I am SOOO making a how to page for this so other noobs don't have to bang their head like I just did.

The mount point area just looks like files to any non-UPnP application. You can pretend that the files are just local as far as they are concerned. The streaming will be "behind the scenes" and on-demand - if VLC or mplayer or Xine, whatever opens a "file" in the streaming mount point, as it accesses the data djmount and uShare will stream it real-time.

Standalone streaming client devices will also be able to see the media server and access the data. I use it with the client on the Nokia N800, for example, and it works great.

So, have you started?