Jinzora, Media Streaming nice and easy

I am a big fun of Itunes. I have plenty of MP3s and Itunes helps me keep them organized. The best thing that you can do with Itunes is the consolidation (organizing your media on the filesystem based on their tags/metadata e.g. artist, album etc.). So that’s OK when you listen to your music in the house, but what about listen to it through the Internet e.g. when you are at work?

There are solutions for this also. I have play with plenty of them (both in Linux and Windows, gnump3d is a simple and easy solution for Linux) but yesterday I managed to install the Jinzora2 media server on my home theater windows PC, where all my media files reside. The system is based on Windows XP SP3 and the installation is completely simple. If you are a Linux fun, try to install the WampServer and Jinzora2 packages for your distribution, for the rest of you, who are still stuck in the Windows world, please read further.

Basically what you need is the WampServer (compact installation of Apache, PHP and mySql) and the Jinzora2 media server.

Download the WampServer from here and install it wherever you like on your System. Just run the executable and click next, next, next … After that download the Jinzora2 from here (chose the Windows version) and extract the folder under “www” folder, in WampServer installation directory.

We are almost there.

For security reasons we have to change the mySql “root” user password.

• Left-click on the WAMPSERVER small icon on the bottom-right corner of your screen (next to the clock). Then click the “phpMyAdmin” link. Your browser will be open at the administrator page of mySql. Click the Priveleges tab. Click on the sign of the “root” user (chose the “localhost” root user). Go to the “Change Password” area, type your password and click “Go”.

Hit the http://localhost/jinzora2/index.php and then follow the instruction. You may see some warning messages, although it is not a problem it can disturb you from doing the configuration right. In order to avoid them just do the following:

• Left-click on the WAMPSERVER small icon on the bottom-right corne, go to PHP then PHP Settings and click on “Display Errors”.

And then go again to the configuration page of Jinzora. Follow the instruction for each Step.

• At the “Installation Type” step choose “Standalone” and “Streaming Only”. You can chose also “Streaming and Jukebox” if you want to use Jinzora as a remote control Intrface for playing music at the server.
• At the “Main Settings” step put a username and password that you can remember, you are going to use it for accessing Jinzora2 later on. Chose also the “Tag Data” as your preferred “Data Structure”.
  
• At the “Backend Setup” put the password you have added at the mySql Administration page. Chose also “True” in the “Create Database” selection drop-down.
  
• Now chose your media folder and Import your data. It may take sometime for Jinzora to collect all the data from your media (for me, 60 GB took 15 minutes). When you finish you have to delete the “install” folder under the “www/Jinzora2” folder (where you have extracted the Jinzora2 earlier).

Hit http://localhost/jinzora2 and put the username and the password you gave during the configuration step.

That’s it. Hit on a song or an album and play it.

In order to check if you can stream music to other machines you need a second PC which is connected in the same network. Hit the above URL again but instead of localhost put the servers IP address or its name. If this works fine the next step is to expose this service to the Intenet (If not then probably you have to configure your windows firewall).

You should at least have an ADSL connection, or any other type of Internet access which can stay up all day, if you want to access Jinzora2 from the outer world. You have then to apply a port-forwarding at your router pointing to your “media server” 80 port. I won’t get to further details on that since it mainly has to do with your Internet access type, the configuration of your network and the hardware (modem-router, switches, hubs, cable-modem etc.). This is something you have to find out yourself.