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UPnP AV Support (Or Lack Thereof) in VLC Player

September 15th, 2007
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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?

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  1. Jeremy
    October 18th, 2007 at 18:17 | #1
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    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. Steve
    March 22nd, 2008 at 08:27 | #2
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    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. Jason Stone
    March 26th, 2008 at 08:22 | #3
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    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. Chad Longstaff
    October 23rd, 2008 at 21:57 | #4
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    Thanks for clarifying this, was banging my head a bit trying to get it to work ;)

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