Asus WL-500W is a greate wi-fi router with lots of features, one of them being able to use it as a media server to serve movies/songs over your network from a hard disk connected directly to it through USB. But the media server that is included in the official firmware leaves a lot to be desired. If you are a fan of twonky, all you would have heard so far would have been that to use it on your router, you’d have to change your firmware over to a non-official one. If you do not want to take any risks with the custom firmwares, I’ll tell you a simple way to use twonky with the stock firmware itself. Follow these steps:

  1. Download Twonky (The MIPS version) and extract/save it to some place on the harddisk attached to your router (e.g. /tmp/harddisk/part0/twonky/ )

  2. Create a new shell script for starting twonky automatically (Replace the paths according to where you stored the twonky files in step 1). All you need to do is create a text file with following contents and mark it as executable. We’ll name it init.sh.

#!/bin/sh
route add -net 224.0.0.0 netmask 240.0.0.0 dev br0
cd /tmp/harddisk/part0/twonky<br></br>/tmp/harddisk/part0/twonky/twonkymedia &

  1. Copy this script to your harddisk to where you extracted twonky files.

  2. Open up the router’s web administration page (most probably at 192.168.1.1), go to the USB section, and put the following line under “Initial Script”:

`/tmp/harddisk/part0/twonky/init.sh``

  1. Save, reboot and enjoy :)

If you have any questions, let me know. Infact, the same tip can be used to install many other such softwares onto your Asus routers series including WL-500g, WL-500gP, WL-500W, etc.