Not sure which thread this best fits, so I'll go here.

My new router has the option of a "DLNA" server, where I can hook up a USB hard drive and it will somehow serve up media to devices. I'm not really sure what this is, which I guess is my gap here.

Anyhow, right now I use "Logitech Media Server" on my PC. What I can do with that is steam music remotely to some devices in my house (squeezeboxes) and remotely to android/iOS devices, on which I have installed "Squeeze Player" and "Squeeze Commander". Pretty klugy apps, but it works.

What I'm wondering is if there's a way I can use this router "DLNA" server to eliminate the dependency on my PC..just connect remotely to my router with some kind of app, and select and stream my music library. Anybody ever do something like that? Is this what a "DLNA" server is supposed to do??

Many solutions available. IMO best is WD My Cloud.

that's a server-side thing right? My new router has the server. I'm just wondering if there are clients out there worth using.

It's both a DLNA server and has apps to act as clients for iOS, Android, etc.

If your router is DLNA and you attach a drive to it, you should be able to access and stream your media with no problem on any networked PC, Mac, Apple TV, WDTV, some Blu-Ray players, Smart TV or even direct to most network AV receivers nowadays (subject to file format compatibility, of course). You'll just find and access it as a normal network share.

The problem with access by iOS and Android devices is that the client software apps you might use (Plex, XBMC, StreamToMe, AirVideo HD, Twonky, Serviio -- I've used them all) is they all require server software to be running on a computer with access to your media. Then your iOS and Android devices can access the media using the client-side companion app. In that sense, they're not much different from the LMS you've been running. I've been running a computer as a server for years, at various times with either a Windows or Mac. In an effort to streamline and simplify, I've switched over to the WD My Cloud. It's an all-in-one NAS which acts as a DLNA server for access around the house, but also has a Twonky media server built in so your iOS and Android devices can access the media both at home and remotely with the WD My Cloud app.

If you haven't done so already, I'd suggest combing the community support for your router to see if any of the usual suspects (Plex, XBMC, StreamToMe, etc.) has written a server app which can be run on your router. That would eliminate the need to run the server app 24/7/365 on a computer. I doubt you'll find it, but you can look.

The bottom line is that, if you want home and remote access to your media, from ALL your AV devices, computers AND phone/tablet devices, you need to either run a server 24/7/365 or go the NAS route, of which the WD My Cloud is at the top of the list these days when considering ease of setup, access, file comparability and price. If you check the reviews on Amazon, you'll see it's the most popular personal cloud (NAS) solution these days.

thanks for the explanations! I was thinking that DLNA was a full-featured server thing, but it seems like it's not. I'll search the user groups (it's a netgear nighthawk R7000). it also givem me an option to "enable itunes server", but it's probably the same deal, where it only offers a subset of the server-based functionality.

Just pay the $10/month for spotify premium

mickbayne wrote:Just pay the $10/month for spotify premium

this is so worth the $

not if you're trying to stream vids

and I own about 30,000 songs. (Yes, I paid for them all). I'm old, so pretty much everything I want to listen to I already have.

If you were on iTunes / iPhone ecosystem, I'd tell you to just get iTunes Match. For $25/yr, you can stream anything you own, not just things bought from iTunes. Anything that apple doesn't have in their library, gets uploaded to their servers and you can stream to your idevice or even offline it and anything apple does have on their severs just gets streamed to you from their library. So if you did a crappy job ripping CDs early on (as I did) they stream you a higher quality version of the same song to you. It works great.

Just checked and it does have a 25,000 song per account.

That's pretty cool. I'd do that. C'MON GOOGLE

Its called Google music Bucky

DO I HAVE THE POWER OR WHAT

I use Spotify for most of what I listen to and then upload stuff that's not available on Spotify to Amazon Cloud Player (free up to 250 songs or $25 per year for 250,000 songs).

Build or buy?

I want a home theater PC so that I can purge my living room of umpteen CDs/DVDs/Blu-rays, gain DVR functionality for OTA TV, pare down to just one remote, etc.

Needs:
* Small form factor and not butt-ugly because it's going to be visible under my TV
* ATSC TV tuner
* Blu-ray (just a reader, no burner needed)
* No internal storage required, I'll pair this with a NAS
* No gaming intended

I can build this for ~$6-700 I think. I can't find any pre-built solution even close to this. So I think I know the answer to my question, I just wanted to know if anyone knows of a pre-built system thoat would suit my needs.

Build. I think you can do what you want there for a lot less than $700.

I'll dig up some links later, but if you use some budget parts and can possibly repurpose some things you may already have (power supply, old hard drive, etc) and use Linux, you can probably do it for about $400 would be my guess.

If you can find an old laptop or one with a broken screen or something you may be able to use that as long as it has a video output that your tv supports.

Check this bundle out from newegg, should get you most of the way there for less than $300

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDeal ... bo.1593704

I think the only thing missing (other than an os) is bluray, but you can add an external bd drive for about $50, then again, if it's to watch bluray movies, you might just be better off with a standalone bluray player. The software to watch a bluray on your computer (last I looked) was fairly expensive (like as much as a stand alone player) and not really all that good.

Thanks Bill.

I ideally want a one-box solution, and something that looks like it plausibly belongs there, so even an old laptop isn't ideal. I had no idea that Blu-ray software was an additional cost, I guess I figured it was built into Windows Media Center. It's not just for watching Blu-ray disks though, I also want to be able to rip Blu-rays so that I can store them on my NAS and get the disks out of my living room.

No problem!
Yeah the fees for the codecs or whatever you have to license is more than os makers want to pay. Even regular dvd's are not supported in windows 8 media center (unless you buy a key for like $10 or something).
This seems to be the go to software for playing blurray on a computer
http://www.cyberlink.com/products/power ... en_US.html
And that costs $60, you can buy a standalone bluray player for that. I'm sure there are other solutions to playing them, but last time I looked (which was maybe a year ago or so, so it may be different now) there just wasn't really much choice in that space.

Also just a heads up, ripping blurays is also far more difficult than ripping DVDs. I bought the dark knight trilogy on blurray a few months ago and wanted to rip it to watch on my iPad and it was fucking difficult. I never wound up getting it to work right and wound up paying to rent it from iTunes so I could watch it on a flight.
From what I understand, they can (and do) change encryption standards on bluray frequently, and once it changes, you have to get new software to watch/rip your discs.
I mostly just buy movies from iTunes or amazon instant nowadays. It's cheaper or at least comparable to the cost of the bluray, and with amazon instant movies I can stream them to my kids tablet, my iPad, iPhone, roku, Xbox, ps3, or any computer in seconds.

Hm... bummer. Seems this isn't going to be a simple as I was hoping. Looks like VLC, which is free, can with a little hack or two play even encrypted Blu-rays. Seems the interface is a little intimidating though, which isn't good for my intended application (I can deal with it but I was hoping to have all of this integrated with Windows Media Center in such a way that my kids could handle it themselves).