Gerbera, stream multimedia content on your home network

About Gerberas

In the next article we are going to take a look at Gerbera. This is a powerful UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media server Feature-rich with a nice and intuitive web user interface. It will allow us to transmit digital media (videos, images, audio, etc.) through a home network and Play it on different types of UPnP-compatible devices, from mobile phones to tablets and many more.

Gerbera is a media server Powerful UPnP, which we will be able to use to stream our digital media over our home network via a nice web user interface. Gerbera implements the UPnP MediaServer V 1.0 specification which can be found at upnp.org. This server should work with any UPnP compliant MediaRenderer. In case of encountering difficulties in certain models, we should consult the list of compatible devices for more information.

Gerbera Characteristics

Gerbera web interface

  • Will allow us browse and play media using UPnP.
  • Supports the file metadata extraction mp3, ogg, flac, jpeg, etc.
  • Highly flexible configuration. We will be able control the behavior of various features server.
  • Supports the user-defined server layout based on the extracted metadata.
  • Offer psychological therapy to employees exif support for thumbnails.
  • Admits automatic directory rescanning (timed, inotify).
  • It offers a nice web user interface with a tree view of the database and file system, allowing to add / delete / edit and browse media.
  • Support for external URLs (We can create links to Internet content).
  • Supports transcoding of flexible media formats through plugins / scripts and many more, including a number of experimental features.

Install and start Gerbera - UPnP Media Server on Ubuntu

In the Ubuntu distribution, there is a PPA created and maintained by Stephen Czetty. From there we can install Gerbera by opening a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stephenczetty/gerbera

sudo apt update && sudo apt install gerbera

Once you have installed the server, we will start, activate and see the status of the service using the following commands in the same terminal:

sudo systemctl start gerbera.service

sudo systemctl enable gerbera.service

We will check if the service has started with:

sudo systemctl status gerbera.service

Gerbera server started

IMPORTANT: Yes Gerbera cannot start on your system, you should try the following actions.

First check if the log file (/ var / log / gerbera) has been created, otherwise create it as shown below:

sudo touch /var/log/gerbera

sudo chown -Rv root:gerbera /var/log/gerbera && sudo chmod -Rv 0660 /var/log/gerbera

In second place, define a network interface that you are using as the value of the MT_INTERFACE environment variable. The default is'eth0', but if your interface is called something else, change the name. In Debian / Ubuntu, you can set this configuration in the / etc / default / gerbera file.

Gerbera network interface configuration

Get started with Gerbera Media Server Web UI

The service Gerbera listens on port 49152, which we can use to access the web UI through a web browser:

http://dominio.com:49152

o

http://tu-dirección-ip:49152

Gerbera error start firefox

If you get the error shown in the screenshot above, you must enable web user interface from the Gerbera configuration file. Edit it by typing in terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

sudo vim /etc/gerbera/config.xml

Here we will change the value enabled = »no» to enabled = »yes» as shown in the following screenshot.

config.xml gerbera home server

After making the above changes, we close the file and we are going to restart the Gerbera service. To do this we write in the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T):

sudo systemctl restart gerbera.service

Now let's go back to our browser and we will try to open the UI one more time in a new tab. This time it should load. You will see two tabs on it:

  • Confidential Information. It will show us the files that can be accessed publicly.
  • File System. This is where we will be able to search for files on our system and select them for transmission. To add a file, we will simply click on the plus sign (+), as you can see in the following screenshot.

Gerbera file system add video

After adding files for file system streaming, the database interface should look like this.

Video added to Gerbera server

At this point, we can start streaming media files through our network from the Gerbera server. To test it, we could use a mobile phone, a tablet or any other that allows us to use a UPnP application  to play the files.

If we want to obtain more information about this server, anyone can consult the page of Project GitHub or on official website.


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  1.   Tony said

    Thanks Damian for your input. All perfect.
    I take this opportunity to thank the entire team at Ubunlog. Excellent work you do.

    regards
    A loyal subscriber.

    1.    Damian Amoedo said

      Thank you for reading us. Salu2.