1 Introduction

GMediaServer is a UPnP compatible media server for the GNU system. It is part of the GNU project.

GMediaServer serves audio and video files to certain network connected media players. Most hardware media players only play music and/or video—they don't provide the media themselves. Those media files have to come from a device on the network. GMediaServer is a server for such UPnP compatible media players - hardware based as well as software based. See Supported Devices for a more complete list.

The technical details:

As the name indicates, GMediaServer implements a MediaServer device as specified in the corresponding UPnP standard (see References and Links). The media players issue browse and search requests to GMediaServer through this protocol. The actual audio and video data (e.g. MP3 and OGG files) is however transferred using a different protocol. Currently that is HTTP—GMediaServer uses the built in HTTP server of libupnp for this purpose.

GMediaServer is written in C by Oskar Liljeblad. It should compile and run on any modern POSIX compatible system such as GNU/Linux. GMediaServer is a console based application which is usually run in the background. It is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.