I am sharing my experience while finding a good media-server (software that can store, transcode and serves various media formats to devices – computers, mobile, apple-tv, etc).

We all (parents, brother, sister-in-law, sister and myself) stay together, which means we have got more than one TV, various devices (mobile, computers, laptops, etc). We realized, it’s useful to host the media at one central computer.

• Storage
• Wiki – to jot down the links and ideas
• Development and Testing – when we work at/from home
• Media Server (software that serves media to various devices in home)

Most of the requirements (above) are sorted out except the last one “Media Server”. I looked at various options, some of these are listed below:

• TVersity
• PS3MediaServer
• XBMC (as UPNP server)
• Darwin Streaming Server
• VideoLan (VLC) as Server

I found myself more comfortable with TVersity, though it’s not opensource and only runs on Windows, for following reasons

• Ease in administration:
  • anyone in my family can add/remove media using it’s easy to use administration interface.
  • admin tool runs using Adobe Flash Player, has been built using OpenLaszlo framework and executable has been created using Zinc like tool.
• Ease while using:
  • Web based interface for administration – runs on Adobe Flash Player
  • Web based interface for media library
    • Simple HTML
    • Flash based (built using OpenLaszlo) – where media is transcoded and played using Flash Player, awesome, isn’t it?
    • iPhone friendly interface
• Support for Open DLNA and UPNP
• Automatically detects (most of) devices, transcodes and serves media, if required
  • That means, ffdshow and other tools can be used to add subtitle and apply various filters before serving the videos.
• XBMC/Boxee that runs on my macbook and apple-tv worked really well with TVersity

You can find the complete list of features on TVersity website.

So now life is simpler and easier, we all store our media at one place and can see it anytime and on most of our devices. Having web-based access to media makes life easier. I also feel, it’s lot easier to extend web-interface, which I plan to do in sometime.

I would love to post about detailed comparison between various options (media-servers and tools) mentioned above, perhaps in another post, sometime in future. Another post would be there to share how our home network looks like. Hope, I can spend sometime drawing diagrams which would be lot easier to understand.