A year ago I posted an article on how I stream videos and music to my Xbox 360 using Linux and PacketVideo’s TwonkyMedia DLNA server.

In the year and a quarter since I posted the article a few things have changed. I picked up a PS3 which also allows me to stream music and videos to it and the new version of the TwonkyMedia server software was released. Unfortunately, the new version, version 5, broke my existing setup. So much so that I had to revert back to using 4.4.11.

After upgrading to the latest version, I setup the content directories that I wanted it to scan and it would never pick up anything and therefore no streaming. This afternoon, after poring through their forums (their actual support is terrible), I downloaded their beta release of 5 (version 5.055 to be exact) and tried to get it running again. No go.

I gave up, uninstalled version 5 and went back to version 4.4.11; at least for a couple of hours. Fortunately for me, my determination to solve problems is almost otherworldly.

In my instance, the problem was occurring because I had my media in the /var directory (/var/media/music and /var/media/video to be exact). For some reason, version 5 of the software refused to read any media from this location. Quite irritating.

The server was reading media from other locations and that was my clue that the server was working, just not reading from the /var directory. Moving all of my media from one location to another would be a pain in the ass, so using a tip from a forum poster I tried creating a symlink (aka alias) from my media directories to my home directory with the following commands:

ln -s /var/media/video /home/carlos/video

Once that was done, I put in the new content directories into Twonky (/home/carlos/video and /home/carlos/music) and then restarted the server. After restart I told it to re-scan the content directories and it finally recognized my media.

Now if only it could stream Hulu…