PyBeat - Personal Streaming Media Server

• PyBeat is a very light-weight client/server-program to stream media files over the Internet.
• PyBeat is designed to be very careful with resources on the server (around 8 MB ram and practically no CPU), leaving the CPU/memory intensive work for the client.
• PyBeat requires only Python to be installed.

Download and installation

$ wget http://www.pybeat.org/pub/dist/PyBeat-0.1.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz PyBeat-0.1.tar.gz
$ cd PyBeat-0.1
$ sudo python setup.py install

Checksums

If you want, you can use these to make sure that no bits got lost on their way to you.

$ sha1sum PyBeat-0.1.tar.gz
4a9ba8d96e821c2b1a349f6115788e4bc66dc8f0  PyBeat-0.1.tar.gz
$ md5sum PyBeat-0.1.tar.gz
93ca1205e18d65cc81bc7246ef4d495f  PyBeat-0.1.tar.gz

Usage - Server

The first thing you need to do is to index the music root of your server. In this example my music resides in /mnt/music:

$ pybeat-server.py /mnt/music updatedb

Now we are ready to run the server. In this example I will set it up to bind to every interface on port 8000:

$ pybeat-server.py /mnt/music 0.0.0.0:8000

That's it. Now we are ready to accept clients.

Usage - Client

Again, the first thing we need to do is update the database of media files. The client will fetch a copy from the server (which in this example will be at home.example.org:8000) and save it locally:

$ pybeat-client.py home.example.org:8000 updatedb

Now we are ready to fire up the web interface:

$ pybeat-client.py home.example.org:8000

Now you should be able to point your webbrowser to http://localhost:8000/index/. If, for some reason, port 8000 is in use on your system, you can specify another port as this:

$ pybeat-client.py home.example.org:8000 4242

Notes

• ***IMPORTANT***: PyBeat does not use any form of authentication on the connection between the server and the client yet. So keep your connections firewalled.
• Remember to update your remote and local databases once you get new music worth listening to.
• The code is still a bit messy, and definately needs some refactoring. Keep in mind that this is not a 1.0 release yet - not even close!

Bugs or suggestions

Please e-mail me. My e-mail address is in the header of the programs when they run.

Credits

PyBeat was written by Christian Joergensen when he couldn't find any other suitable application for streaming his music from his NSLU2 to his laptop. With PyBeat, it works great!

Some of my inspiration came from GNUMP3d and edna which are both great programs written by great people - they just take up too much resources on my poor NSLU2 ;-)

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.