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One of the very nice features of my LG BD-390 Blu-Ray player is that it can play video and audio files from the network.  While the player does support many video formats, it does not support all of them, but enough to keep me happy.  My media is kept on a Linux server and I originally shared my directory using Samba so that the player and other computers could read the content.  This worked well for some of my content, but not all.  The player could not see certain formats that it should have and playing other formats was choppy or the audio and video were out of synchronization.

LG Electronics is a member of the Digitial Living Network Alliance (DLNA) and uses Universal Plugin and Play (UPnP) technology to stream media.  Since I was only sharing my media and not really serving my media I was not getting the full functionality.  I use Ubuntu Linux and found that it supports the MediaTomb UPnP MediaServer.  The software is free and is supported under Linux, FreeBSD and OSX.  Under Ubuntu it took less than 1 minute to install and I did not even have to change the configuration file.  Once it started, I connected with my browser and added which folders on my system to share and viola my player was able to see all my media and play them without any stuttering.

The MediaTomb UPnP MediaServer can be used with just about any UPnP device, like the PlayStation 3 or any number of the readily available hardware players and set top boxes out there.  I am able to stream MP4 videos to my iPhone.   It does have its limitations, as it just serves content and does not currently allow for gathering content from outside the PC lile some others do, but it does it job well.  Other media servers can go out and serve Hulu or YouTube content, but none of them are available for Linux just yet.