Universal Media Server. A DLNA, UPnP and HTTP(s) Media Server | Hacker News Reader

Universal Media Server. A DLNA, UPnP and HTTP(s) Media Server

universalmediaserver.com

110 pointsproxysna63 comments

This may be worth a look - I've been using minidlna for probably 10 years and nothing has been as simple as that!

How does this compare to Jellyfin? It is oddly missing from their Comparisons page: https://www.universalmediaserver.com/comparison/

IMO a simpler alternative for anemic nuc's and older pc's. Love it's small footprint and how relatively hands-off it is.

What’s the transcoding experience like? UMS is pretty good at on the fly transcoding of video for older devices like the PS3.

Not for streaming, but for browsing your local videos, I created an MIT Open Source app Video Hub App -- shows screenshots from videos (as you hover over each video). May be useful if you have lots of videos on your computer (or external hard drives / NAS).

https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Interesting. Actually need something like that for my lab. Thanks

Also Stash App, while designed for "adult videos", it's great for other content.

https://github.com/stashapp/stash

I tried building it from source a year ago on multiple tagged releases and it failed to build. Been using minidlna instead, which I’ve been pleased with.

i'd would recommend using a prebuilt docker image or rebuilding it to fit your needs. For my setup i am maintaining my own image with tini init system and some minor added scripts.

Anyone know a good FLOSS basic / lightweight solution for an underpowered machine to serve streaming audio and video to local LAN browser clients with no (or optional) frills such as no db, no running off to download album covers, and so on?

For music only, I am using mpd with upnpmpdcli on a RasPi (zeroW) and control it over BubbleUPnP from my phone. No video solution unfortunately.

mpd plays music through the audio device of the system running mpd, though, right? It doesn't stream, unless there's some configuration I missed... I've been using it locally for years and it's fine at that use-case.

I recently switched from Volumio to Logitech Media Server for playing audio over a couple raspberry pis and like how simple it is. It's GPL and if you install the Material Skin add on it looks nice enough. Volumio was too complex for something that just streams audio files.

mpd is a server. You can get native client that connect to it locally but you can also get web frontends too.

https://www.musicpd.org/clients/

> MPD is designed around a client/server architecture, where the clients and server (MPD is the server) interact over a network. Thus, running MPD is only half of the equation. To use MPD, you need to install a MPD client (aka MPD interface).

Correct. I run mpd on my desktop machine, then connect to it from a client either running on my desktop (https://github.com/floren/Ampd) or on my phone or my laptop. However, regardless of where my client is executing, the music comes out of the speakers attached to my desktop. If there's a way to stream music from the server to the client, I am not aware of it.

I've definitely done it before. It used to be my primary way to stream music at work from my home server. This was likely a decade ago so I couldn't say exactly how it was set up (I've since switched to the, now seemingly abandoned, Subsonic) but knowing me SSH probably played a key part.

To stream from MPD you can configure an output plugin such as: http, shout, snapcast.

https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins.html#output-plu...

Ive been using navidrome lately for self hosted music streaming. It has a bunch of android/ios apps

miniDLNA/ReadyMedia seems to cover what you're looking for. It technically has a DB, but only to keep track of what it's serving (artist, albums, etc.). Supports m3u playlists.

I've been using it for a few years without complaints. Plays nice with VLC, and that can run just about anywhere.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Gerbera is decent, simple and lightweight.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a look.

Which OS? If the sending device is Linux, you can create a null pulseaudio device and set it as default. Then capture from it, compress it and stream out via rtsp using ffmpeg. On the receiving end, ffplay listens on the correct port and plays it. If you're interested I'll grab the commands I run on both sides.

Unlike the other solutions that force you to use mpd to play the music, this captures whatever is playing on the source (YouTube, Spotify, MusicBee)

Yes, it works with pipewire (unlike pulseaudio-dlna)

I'll be honest, it's not perfect but almost

Server is linux, clients would be firefox, under linux / android / windows.

I'm really interested in something that makes video and audio files browsable based on their directory structure, and then simply streamable in-browser, for multiple clients simultaneously.

I wrote a default directory index script to present mp4s as html5 video, but there's also some mkvs and avis. Transcoding on the fly might be a bit heavy for this old machine though, so maybe I should just batch up some transcoding into h264 / aac to run overnight.

How, or why is this an advantage compared to Plex?

The only plus I can see is a focus on DLNA might make DLNA not _strictly_ garbage. In reality if you don't want to use Plex and don't need to rely on DLNA, there's other options out there like Jellyfin or Emby.

Jellyfin is great... client apps for roku & ios plus a web interface cover all my devices. Minimal setup, just run it from a docker container. Has been super stable for me for a few years now. https://jellyfin.org/

DLNA is HTTP-without-S only, by specification. Jellyfin, HTTPS, and DLNA don't work, unfortunately: https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/68279#issuecom...

Jellyfin has had “coming soon” next to Samsung and LG tvs for over 2-3 years. Not much use without native apps considering how awful the built in browsers are.

Ya this is what keeps me off jellyfin. Not having a good xbox or native tv app means its basically useless unless you use roku or something.

I found it awful, on a Raspberry pi 4. Scanning through 2TB of movies on a NAS (gbit nic) took days. No visible indication of progress or where it's stuck. When it's done and there's a load of stuff missing, there's no clear way to find out what it ignored and why, so all you can do it manually go through every movie that it didn't find (easier said than done). I fought with it for 2 weeks and dumped it for Kodi and a direct attached 4tb hdd. Kodi finished the scan super quick and just works.

No sign in required for starters.

Plex is not open source and spies on you.

> spies on you

Can you provide info to back this claim up please?

https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/

Not parent but yeah, that's spying in my book.

Which parts specifically?

The whole thing. Did you even read it?

That's a non-answer

Literally the whole thing, other than the bullshit at the beginning about how deeply they care about your privacy, is about information they collect about you. That's what a privacy policy is.

So this part? Profile Information. You may provide us with profile information such as your e-mail address, username, a profile image, and password when you create an account, or when you edit your account information. You may also provide us with your payment information when you sign-up for a paid service.

OMG, they're...storing the login info you gave them

Everything under “Information We Collect” and “Use, Processing, and Sharing of Your Information” sections.

https://www.universalmediaserver.com/comparison/

I used to use this to make media available to a PlayStation 3. It can do on-the-fly conversion for codecs that aren't supported by the client, though I think Plex can do that kind of thing too.

Nowadays, I use TinyMediaManager to tag all my film and series and make them available to a Raspberry Pi running Kodi/Libreelec. I also tried using JellyFin as there's a good Kodi plugin for that, but prefer giving the Kodi box direct access to the files - seems to work better for keeping its library up to date.

I'd would say that this is a simpler alternative for a smaller or less powerfull pc's.

I love this -- any chance of getting a backward compatible playback page on the web server? I can browse content on my old devices, but HTML5 video player isn't supported. It would be cool to fall back to something simpler (like a redirect to the file)

I tried on many occasions to get Universal Media Server to work on a local Win10Ent file/vm/kodi server. Could never get it working. Tried JellyFin and it worked extremely well from the get-go. UMS is probably good but I found it frustrating.

Does it have an AppleTV app? If not that's a no go for me.

You can use it with VLC or LocalCast for appletv, as UMS is has working DLNA, but i have no recent experience with appletv so can't guarantee that it will work.

Infuse is great on AppleTV to stream any DLNA source.

Infuse is also great for jellyfin too!

UMS runs on the server not the renderer.

I use it to host my movies collection. Recently it got updated to version 11 and they fixed DPI scaling in Windows 10 (at last I can see UMS GUI in proper size!). Best results I get turning off all transcoding which makes client Bubble UPNP work much better

I've been using this for a while to play movies from my laptop on my xbox and it's basically good, the one thing that trips up (probably unavoidably) is seeking through media that is being transcoded. Other than that it basically does the job fine.

This is something I've been trying to settle on for ages. I'm planning on putting a spare raspberry pi to work as a lightweight media center. Was thinking of Kodi or something similar, but this might be a better fit.

better throw my small but popular implementation into the fray: https://github.com/anacrolix/dms

It says it plays DVD images, but no details on how/how well

I want a command line dlna server that takes a file, capture device or stdin and streams it to a dlna rendered. Now. Please.

The comparison of this product to plex is awful sus. They claim plex doesn't automatically transcode or change bitrates, and lacks maximum network bandwidth settings. This is misinformation, Plex does all of those things.

I was confused on that too. It does have "?" for some of those things, not that they say what a question mark is, I read that as untested. Also, I'm not entirely sure what they mean for subtitles, but Plex supports burned in(to the video itself) subtitles, though you end up back in transcode land for that and it took alot of CPU power last time I tried [1]. Plus "instant browsing" is I guess accurate but a weird comparison point, Plex needs to scan files once and periodically scan for updates.

They may mean more specific things for all those things Plex "can't" do, but I can't tell from just the comparison page. Plex has plenty of issues, no need to make up more.

[1] A quote from their page on subtitles: Other formats such as VOBSUB, PGS, etc. may work on some Plex apps but not all. For the majority of apps, both VOBSUB and PGS subtitles will require the video to be transcoded to “burn in” the subtitles for streaming.

I am skeptical of any locally hosted media streaming setup, since I once got a NAS device hacked about a decade ago. Checked the logs and there was shady connections in it. Not sure what vuln they were using, but all my media was exposed to the public facing Internet, which was embarrassing.

Now I just pass files into VLC and watch them at my leisure. Secure NAS is a hard problem, and there’s plenty of articles over the years that talk about NAS systems getting hacked. Even though vendors claim the devices will be secure, there’s no way of knowing, and once it can talk to the public facing Internet, assume all the contents are up for grabs.

Why not use a VPN to access your home network, rather than directly exposing the NAS? Many routers have an L2TP or similar server built-in.

Why did you let it talk to the public facing internet?

> Now I just pass files into VLC and watch them at my leisure.

VLC doesn’t work on a PlayStation, or your average TV. UMS will stream video to just about any device.

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