Darwin Server from Apple.

I was trying to install and use Apple's free Darwin Streaming Server on WinXP. But got into lot of troubles. There were many hit and trials which helped me setup the server.

(1) You need to install DSS. Once it is installed, it would ask you to create admin user name and password. Do that. If all is okay it would start the server. In my case it was not so I had to close the command prompt window [because of perl]

(2) Since I have Cygwin on my machine [The very reason my QT cant be compiled ;)] I could not install DSS, since it works only with Active Perl. So I had to install Active Perl and then had to remove " Cygwin Perl"'s path from my Path.

(3) Then associated "Active Perl" with all .pl files through file assocication. This is not a problem once Cygwin Perl is removed from path and you click on some .pl files, windows would automatically ask you which program to select to run this. Just choose Active Perl.

(4) On two command prompts I had to run DarwinStreamingServer.exe -d [NOTE :: DONT forget "-d" option from command prompt] and streamingadminserver.pl.

(5) Now your server is up and in your web browser you can type http://your.ip.add.ress:1220. It would open DSS Server Admin. Enter your userid and password which you created in step (1).

(6) Now comes streaming part. Remember that by default your media directory is c:\Program Files\Darwin Streaming Server\Movies\. So in case you want to stream some mp3 files put them here. Also dont forget to go to "Port Settings" and enable Port 80, in case you are behind firewall and intend to listen to this server from outside your LAN.

(7) Create Playlists. Go to Playlists on your left pane, click on "New MP3 Playlist", give your playlist name like "sample" and give it a mount point "sample". Now you would see all the mp3 files below it. Add the files you want to add.

(8) Now dont forget to choose your Playmode. NEVER set it as sequential. Or else once all the songs are played, there would not be any thing on your server. I chose "Sequential Looped". And thats it!

(9) Go to Winamp and type http://your.ip.add.ress/sample and you would listen the songs.

Foolishness which I did :- Created a mount point "/", added one file called "sample.mp3", chose the play method as "Sequential" and was trying to access http://my.ip.add.ress/sample.mp3, which of course would not work!

Now I would try to set up straming movies server and then would see if it works too! Meanwhile I have thought of bringing precompiled QT libs from my home laptop and put them on my office PC to see if QT can then be make workable!