When I work from home I mainly sit on my couch, with two small dogs sat with me. On my laptop is 26GB of music, and I listen to it through the crap speakers on my Thinkpad. But, about four feet away is a Playstation 3 plugged into a beefcake surround system. Hmmm, I got thinking and had the thought of streaming my music over the network to the PS3 which could spit said tunes out of aforementioned speakers of beef. I heard that something called uPnP can be used for this, and a recent PS3 firmware update can make this happen.

Speaking to Chris, one of our Canonical sysadmins, he told me about [MediaTomb](https://mediatomb.cc/) which I installed. This provides a uPnP server, but requires quite a bit of tinkering in config files with their requisite obtuse configuration directives. I only want to share MP3s, so I set MediaTomb off indexing my music collection but alas it did not work. I could see the server on my PS3, and see the artists abd albums but when I try to get to a song and play it, it says *Unsupported Data*. A bit of Googling late, it seems a number of people have experienced the same problem. I lose.

This is *waaaay* too hard. One of the most beautiful things about Rhythmbox’s DAAP support is that I just switch it on and my content is shared. Thats it. This is the approach we need for uPnP sharing. Sure, uPnP can share different types of media, but there is no reason why each application type could not stream those specific types of media – Rhythmbox exports music, F-spot exports photos etc. If you wanted a unified server for this, there is no reason why there could not be a gnome-sharing-server that these applications plug in to.

Is anyone working on a solution to this very problem? I would to just tick an option in Rhythmbox and see my content appear on my PS3 via uPnP. Or, am I smoking crack? 😀