Fuppes is a multi platform UPnP A/V Media Server.  This software allows you to share media on your network using UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and allows access to all of your media using a PS3, Xbox360, or any other UPnP compliant device.  Currently I am using Fuppes to share my media to my Xbox360 from the network.

My main reason for deciding to set up a UPnP server was that I wanted to make all of my media available to the workstations and devices on my home network without giving access to my actual machine.  It also gave me the chance to set up a backup system using rsync.

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on a spare Pentium III workstation and installed Fuppes on top of that.  You can use this tutorial to guide you through the installation.  This tutorial helps configure Fuppes for the original XBox, this is not what I used to set my own server up but it will help out anyone new to Linux and gives you ideas.  It includes how to auto start Fuppes when the workstation boots up and shows a basic configuration.  You can find configuration files that others use in the forums on the Fuppes website.

This is my current configuration file.

Fuppes is by far NOT the best UPnP server that is available but it is definately the easiest to set up on Linux.  There is a good community behind the software to help with the wide range of configuration options available.  One of the biggest drawbacks to Fuppes for me is the need to constantly rebuild the database and virtual container used by the UPnP service.  Anytime you add or remove items from the UPnP directories you have to rebuild the database which take a good 5 to 10 minutes depending on the number of files you have available, then you must rebuild the virtual container which takes another 5 to 10 minutes depending on the number of files available.  I created a cron job to run this every hour, but even then it gets annoying.  If you put something up there that you want to watch right away you have the do the rebuilds before it is available.  BIG drawback.  Other than that, runs perfect.  No lag, allows support for many formats, even transcodes formats that the 360 cannot play natively.

This software is also available for windows and may be a lot easier to manage, since I try real hard to keep it legal and do not want to pay for a Microsoft license I looked for something that could run Linux based and wasn’t horribly complicated.

Other UPnP servers available for Linux are Mediatomb (does not work with XBox 360 yet) and UShare.