Question:

How to set up an Ubuntu server that only streams my personal media?

Isabella: 02 February 2022

Hi I am not new to Ubuntu but totally new to Ubuntu server and have spent the last couple of days getting more and more confused. If my question has been asked a million times please accept my apologies, I can't find it but a link to it would greatly appreciated.

I have an old PC (fairly good specs) that I have decided to turn into a media server using Ubuntu 12.04 lts server iso. The only requirment I need my Ubuntu server to do is to perform as a cloud for all of my personal media that can only be connected internally within range of my home WiFi. Further, I don't want to be able to use any Web apps to connect. I just want a PC that will serve my media to my laptop phone xbox 360 etc.

I would also like to do this in the most secure way possible. Is this something i can achieve? Can anyone walk me through it please?

Answer:

Mia: 02 February 2022

Have a look to Rygel, it is available from the standard Ubuntu repositories.

He has the ability to transcode the streamed media using a GStreamer plugin. From the Rygel website :

Rygel provides some server media engines by default, to implement Rygel's streaming and (optionally) transcoding and seeking capabilites.

You may also implement your own media engine instead, to use a different multimedia framework.

GStreamer media engine

Rygel's GStreamer media engine uses the streaming, transcoding and seeking abilities of the GStreamer framework, which is available on most platforms.

The source format may be anything GStreamer's decodebin can handle. The supported output formats are:
Audio:
    MP3
    LPCM
    AAC 
Video:
    MPEG TS
    WMV version 1 (mainly for XBox 360 compatability)
    H.264 baseline with AAC audio in MP4 container 
Simple media engine

The Simple media engine uses no multimedia framework and therefore offers no transcoding or time-based seeking.