Bye bye .... Ampache
I’ve had an urge to setup my own media server at home for a long time now. The idea is that, I wanna be able to listen to and share my humongous music collection anywhere.
My first attempt was to set up Ampache. It worked well for starters, web based installation was breeze and most things worked ‘out of the box’. What Ampache lacked was- A good choice of embedded external players
- Inability to stream video content
- Down sampling music content ‘on-the-fly’ didn’t work.
Not being able to downsample was a big bummer, because if I don’t downsample music, I’ll eat up my bandwidth in 1 day! Of course there are ways to get it going; edit setting files and configuring command line options for lame yourself etc. All I had to do, was to hand-edit the config/ampache.cfg.php file and uncomment some settings for enabling down sampling. Now why would the ampache team make user edit the settings like this for a web-application?
I’m giving up on ampache after 2 months and moving on to other options, most probably Jinzora. Jinzora offers all that amapche lacks, while still having all functionality of amapche.
At the time of writing this post, Ampache team has released a new version which is complete rewrite to php5 and other features, but they still have lots to catch upto Jinzora.