apocryph.org Notes to my future self

15Sep/075

UPnP AV Support (Or Lack Thereof) in VLC Player

Lately I’ve been trying to find a better solution to my video watching system. Currently I have a 19″ LCD monitor in my bedroom, hooked up to a laptop on my WiFi LAN and running Windows XP. When I want to watch a video file I manually start it playing, then recline on my bed. This sucks for a few reasons:

  • Requires manual playing of each video
  • Doesn’t remember where in a series I left off
  • Downloading additional video content is a multi-step process involving my dedicated torrent machine, my NAS box, and my video player box
  • It’s not the slightest bit cool

My ReadyNAS NV+ NAS box supports UPnP AV, so I already have a MediaServer machine exposing my videos. I had heard somewhere that VLC Player supported UPnP streaming, so I looked into it.

First off, the pre-built binaries have no_ UPnP support. They have Zeroconf and some other technology I’ve never heard of. Second, you can supposedly enable UPnP support with the --enable-cyberlink config option when building from source, assuming you download the latest CyberLink for C++ package. Unfortunately, I could barely get VLC compiled without CyberLink (I had the same issue as there guys, and that French prick in the forums is no help at all), and I had absolutely _no luck building Cyberlink for C++ myself on Cygwin. From this thread I conclude the UPnP support is either totally broken or buggy.

Dammit. Are there any free/open source UPnP MediaRenderers out there?

Comments (5) Trackbacks (0)
  1. I wish I could help…

    I, too, am having a hard time finding a upnp media client. I’m sharing my media from a slug (nslu2) using MediaTomb, but can’t find a single, solitary open-source solution to actually CONSUME the content.

    So, if you do ever come across something so magical, please shout it from the rooftops.

    Thanks.

  2. I too have been looking for a software upnp media renderer for more than a year now. Only solutions i’ve found are not free nor open source – Nero 8 includes a great upnp client as does Windows Vista WMP 11 version (not WMP 11 for XP).

  3. I found something called MediaCloud. They said it definitely worked with Mediatomb (which I am using) but I couldn’t get it to run on my mac.

  4. Thanks for clarifying this, was banging my head a bit trying to get it to work ;)

  5. i would look up windows media conect it has the client that is used for WMP in vista and windows 7 but it is designed as a standalone to run next to WMP 9 (wont work if uve installed wmp11) and has the streaming features u want


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