Over the weekend I did some research on devices that can sit in my entertainment center and play music files from my file server. I'm not sure why there isn't a device that can just mount the samba share, but most of the devices want to do streaming instead. This means the server has to run some kind of streaming software.

The Squeezebox solution from Slim Devices looked promising because the slimserver software is GPL and it actually worked. Slim provides a SoftSqueeze hardware emulator of the client player, which is what I used for testing. I was able to play all of my OGG files as well as Internet Radio. Very cool.