PiBox [1] was built as a proof of concept for a variety of purposes. One of those was to serve media in my trailer when we go camping. I use omxplayer to play videos that are provided over SMB between a server and a player system. That works okay but the front end is not particularly user friendly. At least it's not easy to browse videos – they're currently in one long list. It's on my list to fix but who knows when I'll get to tit.
The other day I was reading some tech headlines for linux [4] and ran across mention of running minidlna on a raspberry pi [5]. I wasn't familiar with minidlna, or ReadyMedia [6] as it's now known. A little digging uncovered that it's an open source [7] version of a NetGear [8] product for streaming media: movies, music [9] and pictures. It works by implementing DLNA [10] compliant protocols, a specification designed just for media sharing. I decided I'd try it out at home first. To see how well it worked.
The project doesn't have fedora [11] or CentOS packages but it does provide a statically linked binary. I downloaded that and found it only required install of two files: the binary daemon and a configuration file. The configuration file is short and well commented making it easy to setup. It helped that I had a large collection of music and videos ripped. So I installed the files and ran the daemon as my own user (not root).
Now I just needed some software player that could handle DLNA. Fortunatley, I have a house full of Rokus. There is a simple player app that supports DLNA. I clicked on it and there was my server. I drilled down a few folders and found my music and video [12]. Just like that. In my many years of trying to stream media, that has got to be the simplest tool setup I've ever come across.
The bad news is that most of my 600+ movies are ripped as ISO images. That was done to get the dvd [13] navigation, jumping to chapters, etc. Now I'll have to re-rip them as MP4 or MKV since the Roku doesn't play ISO images.
I also need to see how I can add movies posters. While MP3's have album art, the MP4's appear to just have filenames. Something tells me I can fix that [14]. I just need to find a way to use poster art where it currently exists.
What's interesting with this is the possibility of streaming from pibox [15] using ReadyMedia to a Roku in my trailer. The Roku has an hdmi [16] output, which will support the pico projector [17] we use to play movies on the side of the trailer. The PiBox provides the wifi [18] access point, so the Roku should work fine, I think. I haven't tried this, but it's something now added to my todo list. Since omxplayer doesn't do dlna (that I know of), this may be an alternative to using PiBox with omxplayer for the player.