After months and months of grueling searches, annoying config files, and very little success, I’ve finally uncovered the solution to streaming media from my Drobo FS to other devices in my home (e.g. my Playstation 3 and my iPad).
I’m posting the solution here in hopes of helping others in my situation, because I cannot believe how difficult it was to find, and how dead-simple it was to implement. It’s simply maddening I spent six months living with the problem and only 5 minutes to finally solve it.
The solution?
Install Media Tomb on your Drobo FS. That’s it. I’m not even joking.
You can read on to learn the backstory and hear additional details about my debacle.
The Back-story…
I spent a lot of months (a few hours here or there, on and off) trying to make FUPPES work as my media streaming solution. It’s promoted on the Drobo Apps page, after all, and so I assumed it was the only correct answer available. I tried every combination of search strings I could think of to solve my problem, like “Drobo FS and PS3” and “Stream media from Drobo FS” and “Drobo FS DLNA server” and got nowhere…
Then, after recently getting an iPad, I decided to search “Drobo FS iPad” to see if there were any neat tips for accessing or managing my Drobo via iPad. While I didn’t find anything of that nature, I did uncover this article about how great the Drobo FS is at everything EXCEPT streaming media, which only further cemented my feelings about the situation.
However, as I got to the bottom of the article I noticed two lonely comments, the first of which simply made a casual reference to MediaTomb and linked to http://drobo.jhah.net/apps/mediatomb/start.
I couldn’t believe it. Nowhere else, in all my searching, had I even heard of the open-source application… and here’s this guy simply saying, “I had better luck with this”. Understatement of the century!
MediaTomb isn’t just a UPNP NDLA video streaming solution for the Drobo FS…
MediaTomb is the Only Solution…
This is such a better solution for Drobo FS and media sharing than FUPPES. I’d say the biggest benefit is that it actually works (unlike FUPPES), and it requires no configuration (unless you wanted to do the same alteration I mention below). And, best of all, unlike FUPPES which can take hours to update its database after you manually tell it to do so, MediaTomb updates the database quickly and automatically.
It took about 5 minutes for me to install on my Drobo (3 of which were remembering how to even access the Drobo Apps admin), and another 2 minutes to disable the auto-scan running on the entire file system and instead enable an auto-scan for only my Media share. Within about 60 seconds I was able to access all 200 of my full-length movies on my Drobo directly from my PS3 (no extra setup needed there) and via my iOS devices (using Meia Link Player Lite). Plus, any time a file is added/removed/changed those changes will be made instantly and automatically to the database.
Did this help you?
Please sound off in the comments!
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