Gerbera is a free UPnP media server which allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and consume it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices. It’s based on MediaTomb and work with any UPnP compliant client.
With Gerbera you can stream your personal media library of movies, TV shows, and music to a wide range of devices ranging from smart TVs and streaming boxes to game consoles and mobile devices.
Related: 5 Best Linux Video Players on Which You Can Rely on
It’s a UPnP server for Linux home network streaming and other platforms. Keep in mind, that Gerbera operates differently than the likes of Plex, Emby, and Subsonic. It runs on the UPnP networking protocol and is only for accessing digital media on devices within your home. In other words, Gerbera is limited to in-home streaming.
Gerbera Key Highlights
- Browse and playback your media via your network on all kinds of devices.
- Web UI with a tree view of the database and the file system, allowing to add/remove/edit/browse your media.
- Metadata extraction from MP3, OGG, AAC, M4A, FLAC, JPG files.
- Media thumbnail support.
- Highly flexible media format transcoding via plugins / scripts.
- Automatic directory rescans.
- User defined server layout based on extracted metadata.
- Supports last.fm scrobbing.
- On the fly video thumbnail generation.
- Support for external URLs.
- Runs on Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and more.
- Runs on x86, ARM, MIPS, and more.
Waht’s New in Gerbera Media Server 1.9.0
Since release of the last version many issues have been fixed. The Gerbera devs also making several new features available. The more important ones are:
- Many more things have been added to configuration (order of resources for album art, DLNA profiles, UPnP properties).
- Gerbera now can display dynamic containers, i.e. its contents are calculated as you click. This may show you recently add or changed media.
- Gerbera now supports client specific transcoding, i.e. video is only transcode for your older devices, newer can stream it as it is.
- The compatibility with Samsung TV sets was increase again.
- Minor media and UPnP additions in search allow you to make the most out of your files.
In the addition to the above-mentioned, the devs worked hard to remove legacy code from the database layer to make it even faster and easier to maintain. As a consequence, support for older columns was dropped which means after upgrading to 1.9.0 the database is migrated and cannot be used with older versions anymore. Based on this a resources table was created to contain all the details on media, like subtitles, thumbnails etc.
For more information about all changes in the new version, you can refer to the full changelog or you can visit the project’s website.
How to Install Gerbera Media Server
Ubuntu / Linux Mint
In order to install Gerbera on Ubuntu or Linux Mint, you need first to add the Gerbera PPA.
curl -fsSL https://gerbera.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/gpg/key/public | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-add-repository https://gerbera.jfrog.io/artifactory/debianCode language: JavaScript (javascript)Once you have added the PPA to your system, update the package list and install Gerbera.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install gerberaCode language: JavaScript (javascript)Debian
Gerbera is included by default in Debian Buster and Sid. Just type:
apt install gerberaFedora
Gerbera is available in Fedora 29 or later. To install it type the following command:
sudo dnf install gerbera
