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The Linkstation was not satifying what I needed. So I turned to the internet to see what I could do about the problems I was having. I found a site called Nas-central which happened to have a ton of info about hacking the Buffalo NAS devices. The site had so much information it wasn’t well organized so I spent a good amount of time just figuring out what I could do with the Linkstation. I started my search by finding out more about what the Linkstation has out of the box, and then what I could do with it. It turns out the Linkstation runs a Buffalo modified version of Linux and because of that it is pretty easily hacked with a few utilities.

The first thing was to figure out what operating system I wanted to run on the Linkstation. I found a few main options. Most people would either hack the standard firmware, install a modified buffalo firmware called jtymod, install a more open version of the buffalo firmware called openlink, or install a full replacement with a build of debian linux called freelink. All three options had very good merits, but for my needs I tried to just wanted to get a better DLNA server installed so I decided to modify the current buffalo firmware using acp_commander.

The next thing I needed to decide was what DLNA server I was going to install. I had no idea there were so many DLNA servers out there. The main options I found were mediatomb, ushare, FUPPES, and twonky. I was already pretty familiar with mediatomb because I was using that on my desktop for sharing media. I was familiar enough with it to know I wanted to look for something else. While ushare and FUPPES seemed pretty limited in their options they had one big advantage over twonky.  They are free whereas twonky costs $30. I really liked the features of twonky 4.4.4 so I installed the 30 day trial and gave it a test drive with my PS3. I was very impressed. Not only did twonky have a great web interface to configure everything you could want, but it also worked right away in Windows Media player 11. As soon as twonky scanned all of my media I was able to play almost everything on my PS3 without problems.  I had a couple of problems with videos cutting out but quickly realized that the wireless network was not able to keep up with the high bit rates of some of my videos. It turns out that with twonky installed and the default DLNA server turned off a lot of the hard drive noise was gone as well.

So I got a replacement DLNA server installed and fixed the problem with the drive being loud. But I wasn’t finished. The default firmware still gave me very limited samba settings and required all of my folders to be ordered in a fassion that only my grandma would do if she had 200 GB of divx files. So next I need to installed Freelink.