The state of upnp media players (or: what's wrong with VLC?)

Cdh · 2012-02-22 21:41:14

Hi,

So recently I installed mediatomb and was amazed that I could set music and video sharing up in about 3 seconds (minus navigating to the directories ) and have it immediately played by a windows media player on the same network.

So I was looking for playing things on linux too. But strangely there is no real solution for just connecting to upnp and playing things which I find very strange.

First I was looking at KDE stuff. Amarok has this support experimentally (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=129097) but it doesn't seem to work yet.

Then gnome/gtk stuff... rhytmbox has this https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23808 but it's out of date and does have an invalid PKGBUILD.
banshee doesn't seem to have upnp support.

So these were the most popular and active players and none of them seems to have mature upnp support.

I even tried a full blown mediacenter like XBMC. Nope, only starts using the CPU much and just sits there waiting. I didn't have much patience.

To the rescue comes VLC it seems. The upnp tab in the playlist discovers upnp servers nicely. Doubleclicking on any gives no visual feedback whatsoever. However after a little while the CPU usage on the mediatomb server gets very high for some time. Another little while later VLC starts consuming vast amounts of CPU time. After another little time the upnp server representation in the gui gets expandable and I can actually see all the shared music. However, trying to play anything connects to privoxy on Port 8118 (oh why does libproxy "suggest" it???) and obviously fails.

Is there some difficulty in supporting playback over upnp I don't see so that NONE of the big linux and cross platform players can support it reliably? I mean, the servers are great but what's the use without a decent client?

I would be fine with settling with vlc, even with the awkward GUI. So I'd like to concentrate on that. Is there something obvious I am missing in the usage of VLC?
Can it be easily fixed?

elric_ed · 2012-02-23 20:22:01

I didn't realize accessing uPnP servers was such a hassle on linux. I thought VLC would get it done, but you are right when I tried to connect to my mediatomb server, it failed in a similar fashion.

However I found this: http://djmount.sourceforge.net/ which lets you mount the uPnP folders using FUSE.
There is an AUR package at http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=13817

Hope that helps.

rwd · 2012-02-26 20:00:09

I have tried upnp too and decided that a sshfs lan-share for my media works well enough, for mediaplayers it is just like playing from a local disk.For windows you could use a samba share.

Last edited by rwd (2012-02-26 20:01:31)

Cdh · 2012-02-26 21:53:16

I have found that DAAP shares work reasonably well, but I thought it was nice that a windows media player would pick up mediatomb so nicely. Haven't tested windows media player with daap though, maybe it's also as nice.

Sure I could mount the upnp share.. but for bigger music shares for example I'd need another mediaplayer indexing those files again (because, easier search functionality in id tags and stuff)... So the upnp mediaserver indexes files only so I start up a player and index the already indexed files.

mangus · 2012-02-26 23:14:21

vlc is working nicely here , streaming via minidlna server on my home server , just give it some time to explore the directories.
minidlna is by far the best upnp server out there imho , streaming nicely my HD mkv on a samsung tv also.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-02-22 21:41:14

The state of upnp media players (or: what's wrong with VLC?)

#2 2012-02-23 20:22:01

Re: The state of upnp media players (or: what's wrong with VLC?)

#3 2012-02-26 20:00:09

Re: The state of upnp media players (or: what's wrong with VLC?)

#4 2012-02-26 21:53:16

Re: The state of upnp media players (or: what's wrong with VLC?)

#5 2012-02-26 23:14:21

Re: The state of upnp media players (or: what's wrong with VLC?)

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