How to use the home media server program. How to set up a DLNA server: setting up a media server on your home network

UPnP (abbreviationUniversal Plug and Play – a set of network protocols published by the forum of the same name.

The UPnP Forum is an open association of industry representatives with the goal of developing standards for UPnP technology, the goal of which is to simplify the integration of smart devices, initially at the level of home and subsequently corporate networks.

UPnP is based on standards and technologies such as TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP, XML and ensures automatic connection establishment between similar devices and their collaboration on the network.

In this case, in order to give access, for example, to the resources of an FTP server located on a PC, you need to perform a port forwarding operation on the router and assign a static IP address to the computer.

Note! Using the UPnP function on the router, all port forwarding settings are carried out automatically, so this method is suitable for people just starting to learn computers. The downside of UpnP is that it reduces the security level of your home network.

In most cases, the user receives a router with UpnP mode activated. Let's check the activation of this mode in the settings of our router.

To do this, write the IP address of your router in any available browser (usually this is 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1), enter your login and password.

TP-Link

Section “Forwarding”, subsection “UpnP” - “Status - Enabled”

D-Link

“Advanced” section, “Advanced Network” subsection, the “Enable UPnP” field is checked.

ASUS

“Internet” section, “Connection” tab - “Enable UpnP” checkbox is checked in the “Yes” field.

After UPnP mode has been enabled on the router, you must also enable it in the application that requires port forwarding.

For example, to enable UpnP in Skype you need to go to the section "Additionally", subsection "Compound" and check the box next to "Enable UpnP".

Creating a DLNA home media server

DLNA- a technology that allows you to combine devices into a single digital network for the purpose of receiving/transmitting and viewing various media content online.

In practice, it looks like this: there is a computer with a larger capacity hard drive on which photos, films, audio recordings and other media content are stored.

What if you want to watch one of the movies not on your PC screen, but on a large TV?

Or you have friends over and you want to show your vacation photos either on the big TV screen or on your phone because you don’t want to go into the house.

What if each family member wants to watch their media files on their personal device (phone, tablet)?

The problem is solved by creating a PC-based media server and combining all devices into a single network using a router.

Draw your attention to that routers that support the 802.11N standard (data transfer speeds up to 300 Mb/s) do not always cope with transmitting large volumes of high-quality video streaming over Wi-Fi and fading occurs on the TV screen.

Download and install the program.

After installation is complete, you should indicate from which directory and what type of content will be broadcast to the network (the “Add” button on the right panel of the program).

The selection is made by placing green dots next to the corresponding directories and content type.

To add resources located on network or removable drives, you must check the appropriate boxes at the bottom of the window.

If necessary, you can add the program to startup and install the service "Home Media Server", this will allow the program to start automatically after turning on the computer.

To start the DLNA server, click the “Launch” button in the top panel of the program, after which you need to turn on the TV.

To launch the content, right-click on the file and select from the context menu "Play on..." instead of three dots there will be your device (in our case, a TV).

All devices that have a DLNA module have been tested in advance and have a corresponding sticker on the case.

It is also necessary to have a description of the type of content supported; there is a DLNA server, printer or player, that is, the module allows you to transmit a certain type of content - images, signals, sound.

All these devices can be freely connected to each other, depending on their purpose, the equipment has its own class. The following classes can be distinguished:

1. Digital media servers. This category includes storage devices such as mobile phones.
2. Digital media players. This includes devices that can receive and play digital content. For example, a TV that can play music and sound from another device.

How to create a home network

The home network layout for DLNA is similar to the Internet data transmission pattern.

It is he who ensures that devices connect to each other. To set up your home network you will need the following:

1. TV to play.
2. Media server for data storage, phone or laptop.
3. Router – used to provide connection between receiving and transmitting devices.
4. Cables or wireless adapters are required to connect DLNA to the network.
5. Powerline adapters - allow you to distribute the Internet over the electrical network.

The first thing you need to do is connect your media playback device to your router.

There are several ways to do this - connecting via an electrical network, via a cable, or via a wireless bridge.

• Powering your media device is a great way to set up a network throughout your home. For this, regular electricity is used, no cables are needed. For setup, only an adapter for a Powerline socket can be useful.
  All that is required is simply to connect the TV to the network via an adapter and your DLNA home network will begin to function.
• If the router and TV are located nearby, it is best to use a cable connection. The Ethernet cable connects to the TV and router port.
• Creating a media group using a wireless bridge is appropriate when the TV is located far from the router. The bridge can be connected to a TV via cable, and to a router via a wireless network.

Advice: The optimal solution for any case would be an electrical connection.

The next setup step is connecting other DLNA devices to the router.

After connecting to the TV, you can connect any DLNA server to the network - laptop, phone, tablet.

But if this is not possible, you can connect them using the methods indicated above.

Thus, the TV will be able to “see” the devices and play content.

Setting up DLNA Homegroup devices

In order for the TV to recognize content, you must configure the media group devices. For laptops and tablets, you will need to install special software.

These may be the following programs:

• Windows Media Player 11 or 12.
• VAIO Media Server (for TV from Sony).
• AllShare for Samsung.
• LG Smart Share.
• Home Media Server.

You must allow the group access to the laptop; this can be done in the software settings by activating media file sharing.

These can be music files, images or videos. Typically a library or list is created that can later be played by a media device.

Not every smartphone can be connected to a DLNA group. But those that have this function connect via Wi-F to a wireless router.

Fable

The first attempt to break the impasse was video streaming. Judging by the RTSP protocol specification (RFC 2326), it must support broadcast playback control: PLAY, PAUSE, and TEARDOWN. Unfortunately, after VLC was configured to stream, it turned out that the pause request was either not processed by this server and only worked on the server side, or was not sent by the smartphone client. Moreover, in any case, in this way only the video file selected on the server for broadcasting was available, and not the entire media library.

But the first disappointment did not dampen the ardor; the search continued.

Next in line was Home Media Server, better known as Home Media Server - a program that provides media resources (photos, audio and video files) of your computer to other UPnP (DLNA) devices on your home network. After installation, it pleased me with the wealth of options and ease of configuration, but... I was completely disappointed due to the fact that the Nokia 5800 did not support UPnP/DLNA, as mentioned above, and the video completely refused to play via HTTP...
A working alternative was needed. This is where the media server caught my eye TVersity- the name came up in someone’s comment while discussing DLNA media servers.

So...

For starters, the interface. Friendly, and I would even say quite simplified. First of all, I immediately went into the settings. Hints for each option (even in English) simplify configuring the server “for yourself.”

The most important thing for me, of course, was video transcoding. The server settings, unfortunately, are aimed at the average user, so you won’t be able to play around with fine-tuning codecs, but something is better than nothing at all, right?

Setting up the media library is also quite simple (and, unlike the aforementioned Home Media Server, does not require a long restart when updating); when adding a source, you can use special checkboxes to specify the type of its content: audio, video, and/or images. I say “source” and not “folder” because this way you can add external content: for example Video RSS or Internet Radio, as well as some services like Youtube and Flickr. By the way, please note that when you select a folder using the “Browse...” button, you will get crappy names instead of Cyrillic names, so it’s better to enter the name manually or copy-paste it from the file manager.

Well, we figured out how to set up the library. Now let's talk about how to work with it. And let's start with what all this was started for: watching videos from a smartphone. Happy owners of the Nokia 5800 know that the smartphone fundamentally cannot open the AVI container, and initially this was a big problem, because... local viewing of a movie required converting the video to MP4, but then third-party players appeared that supported this container. In this case, it doesn't matter - you just need FLV support, which is not a problem for him. So, as mentioned earlier, access to the media library is implemented in two ways. To view HTML pages in the address bar you need to specify http : //server-address:port/lib, and to download an interactive flash application - http : //server-address:port/flashlib. In this case, the last option is exactly what you need, so a bookmark with the address is created in the smartphone browser

http : //192.168.1.33:41952/flashlib. Well, now you can check what happens.

And this is the picture that turns out: after a short download of the flash application, the library directory appears on the screen with quite convenient navigation:

For smooth video playback, I had to play around with the transcoder settings, but in the end I managed to achieve an acceptable picture. True, the positioning slows down significantly, but this is not such a significant problem - you can put up with it.

In the media server itself, you can view the broadcast status, the list of addresses of devices connected to it, the status of video transcoding, as well as a log of operation and connections.

DLNA/UPNP

With Linux everything turned out to be a little more complicated. From the list of cross-platform UPnP/DLNA media clients, I simply could not install XBMC - it did not have binaries for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal in the repository, and the installed VLC - under Linux it does support UPnP - did not always find the server, although at the same time I It was great to access it through a browser. As a result, it was decided to look for another way.

As a result, one wonderful thing was found called a utility based on mounting UPnP server resources. Since the program was already in the repository, installation did not take much time. Now all that remained was to create a mount point and register auto-mounting. After some research and stepping on the rake, this was finally accomplished. All of the following commands can only be executed as root, so be sure to run:

Sudo-s

First you need to create a folder that will be the mount point:

Cd/media
mkdir upnp
chmod 777 upnp

Now, actually, launching FUSE and mounting itself:

Modprobe fuse

After this, you can already enter the library as a regular folder and open its contents in any convenient programs as regular files.

By the way, I have not found any mention anywhere about the most unpleasant rake I found in working with djmount, expressed in incorrect file encoding. According to the DLNA specification, file names must be exclusively in UTF-8 format, therefore TVersity Media Server does not even have a file name encoding setting. Judging by the message, when mounting, djmount also uses this encoding by default - UTF-8. But the file manager, as well as the console, stubbornly refused to display the usual letters in file names, replacing them everywhere with question marks. Attempts to specify the CP1251 or IBM-866 encoding did not lead to complete success, although now it was possible to at least look into the Cyrillic folders. To my complete surprise, the solution to the situation was to directly indicate the use of UTF-8 encoding - I don’t know why I decided to try it, but it worked!

Autostart also turned out to be not an easy task, but then Google came to the rescue, and as it turned out, the problem with the impossibility of automounting from fstab had already been solved. As a result, mounting occurs every time the network is brought up. This is done as follows. Let's create a script:

Cd /etc/network/if-up.d
nano djmount

Script contents:

# Not for loopback!
[ "$IFACE" != "lo" ] || exit 0

Modprobe fuse
fusermount -u /media/upnp
djmount -o iocharset=UTF-8,allow_other /media/upnp

We set the attributes for it:

Chmod 755 djmount
chown root djmount
chgrp root djmount

That's all it really is now. The media library is accessible from any device in any possible/convenient way.

In this article, you will learn how to set up the Home Media Server program, as well as how to access movies, music and photos located on your computer from your smart TV. If your TV supports network connection via Wi-Fi or LAN and supports real-time media content transmission via DLNA technology, then you should definitely take advantage of this.

Of course, you can play music and videos from a flash drive, but before that you need to transfer all the information to it. In our case, you just need to give the TV access to any folder on your computer in which media content is stored.

There are proprietary applications from TV manufacturers, for example, LG has Smart Share, and Samsung has AllShare. Often, applications from manufacturers leave much to be desired and do not provide the necessary functionality, which cannot be said about the wonderful Home Media Server program. By the way, you can connect to the created media server not only from a TV, but also from any other DLNA client, for example, from a game console.

Before you start setting up your home media server, you need to connect your TV using the connection method available to you, usually LAN and Wi-Fi. It is most convenient to connect the TV to a router, but in extreme cases you can connect directly to a computer or laptop.

Setting up a media server.

If you still do not have Home Media Server installed, you can always download it from our catalog.

After installing the program, open it and go to the menu "Settings".

In the left part of the window that opens, select a category "Media resources", on the tab "Directory List" you must specify which drives (local, network, removable) and folders with media content will be available on the TV. By default, standard folders with photos, videos and music are already open.

To add the necessary folders and drives, use the button "Add". In the Explorer window that opens, you just have to select the folders or drives to which you want to give access and click "OK".

When adding or deleting folders or drives, it is necessary to scan media resource directories; usually the program itself requests permission to scan. This will keep the list of available files up to date.

You can also set up automatic directory scanning. On the tab "Scanning" you need to check the two checkboxes shown in the screenshot below. Please note that checking the box opposite "Automatic scanning of directories when they change while the server is running" may slow down the speed of navigating through directories on the TV.

Here we recommend checking the box before "Always use file name as media resource name", then in the list you will always see files with their own names, otherwise the TV will name the file based on its tags.

In category "Devices" in the dropdown menu "Default device type" you need to choose the device that best matches yours. Depending on the selected device, the list of formats supported by the device will change.

If you know that your TV supports more formats than are presented in the proposed list, then you can open the settings window by clicking on the corresponding button, and in the extensions fields "Movies", "Music" And "Photo" Specify the required formats separated by commas.

In category "Additionally" you can set the program to start automatically and the server to start automatically when you turn on the computer. To do this, you need to check certain boxes indicated in the screenshot. It is also recommended to check the box opposite “Installing the Windows Home Media Server service (UPnP, DLNA, HTTP)”, in this case the media server will run as a service.

This completes the home media server setup.

Now you need to launch it by clicking on the button "Launch".

Now you can turn on the TV. If everything is connected correctly, the TV icon should appear at the bottom of the program window on the tab "Playback Devices (DMR)".

If the TV does not appear, click on the button on the right side of the window "Update". If the TV icon does not appear, it means you have not connected the TV to your computer or home network correctly. Most often, in more than 90% of cases, the problem occurs due to incorrect settings of antiviruses and firewalls. Disable them, if the TV icon appears, then you need to configure them correctly.

Viewing media resources.

After setting up your home media server, you can start viewing shared content in two ways.

The first, naturally, starts playing content from the TV, following the instructions for your device.

Second, start playback directly from the Home Media Server itself. To begin, in the main program window you need to select the type of content to be played by clicking on the tab icons "Movies", "Music" or "Photo". Next, on the movie we need, for example, right-click and select "Play on" and select TV. At the same moment, the movie should start playing on the TV.

The Home Media Server program actually provides a huge number of various settings and offers playback of not only videos, music and photos, but also Internet radio, as well as IPTV. In turn, we only looked at setting up a home media server to open access to files stored on the computer for playback on the TV.

Today, many users are faced with the problem of playing video stored in the memory of your computer or file storage on other devices, such as a TV, game console or tablet. All this is quite feasible using DLNA.

1. The device on which you want to view media content supports DLNA technology and is connected to your home network.
2. The version of your operating system is older than Windows 7 home basic.
3. If you use a wireless WI-FI connection, then its bandwidth should be enough for comfortable transmission of media data. (Preferably use 802.11n standard)

First, we will need to create a “home group” on the PC from which we are going to stream media content. First of all, go to the control panel.

And here is the homegroup password, write it down, later you can change it to one that is easier for you to remember.

Configuring HomeGroup Settings:

After we click “READY,” a window with homegroup parameters should appear in front of us. Here we make the final settings and can change the password that was assigned automatically. (! Recommendation - change the password before connecting other devices to your home group, otherwise they will all be excluded from it!)

How it works?

Now you can access previously selected folders, such as “Video”, “Music” from other devices. Accordingly, on your devices, you will see these folders as “Video Library”, AllShare, SmartShare and others. The names may change, it all depends on the manufacturer and the type of device itself, but this does not change the essence. (Often, this information can be clarified from the user manual that comes with the equipment)
In addition, the fastest way to get to the settings menu of your media server is to launch the standard operating system application - Windows Media Player. From this menu item you will go to the media streaming settings.

Possible difficulties:

Sometimes, devices such as a TV may encounter video that it cannot play. To do this, you just need to enable the “Allow remote control of the player” option and do not close it (the player) on the computer
.
By following all the above recommendations, we were able to set up a media server at home, without using any third-party programs or devices.