Smart Media Player Network Access in Fedora 20

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 08:01 +1000, Stephen Morris wrote:
> > Keeping the neighbours out is just standard network practice: use a
> > decent WPA password on the router, and keep a tight control on
> incoming
> > connections via the server firewall. IIRC the server config can also
> > restrict clients to certain IPs though I haven't bothered with that.
> My concern with dlna from Windows or Linux was not so much with 
> neighbours hacking into the network, but if the dlna stream is not 
> transmitted to a specific device like Miracast is, then it was 
> potentially conceivable that it could be broadcast and inadvertently 
> played on the neighbours receiver without really meaning to.

It *is* transmitted to a specific device, but the transmission is
initiated by the client pulling it from the server rather than the
server pushing it to the client. At the transport level it's exactly the
same. The neighbours are not going to be bothered a) because it's not a
multicast service, i.e. each client gets its own individual stream, and
b) because they can't see inside your network (as long as you set it up
correctly as mentioned last time).

> One of my collegues that I work with uses a homeplug type device and 
> tells me it works very well, so I could look at that although I'm not 
> sure how well it would work in a powerboard as I don't have any spare 
> wall power points.

No way to tell without trying it, but these things are designed for
fairly noisy environments and even multiple phases (i.e. homes with
several power rings). All the same, I would put the Homeplugs on their
own sockets and move something else to the multiconnector if possible.

> I have a few other issues I need to sort out as well. 
> I have finally managed to get nfs on the nas usable but the playback
> on 
> the android player is worse than the playback via smb on the same 
> device. I can use dlna to get the player to stream movies from the
> nas 
> which seems to give a bit better performance, but I have movies in 3 
> directories, with one directory containing mp4 files, the 2nd with
> mov 
> files and the 3rd with an mkv files, but dlna is unable to even see
> the 
> directory containing the mkv files and at the moment I don't know
> why. 
> The 2 directories that dlna can see were created by Windows whereas
> the 
> directory it can't see was created from Fedora via Samba, which might 
> explain the issue but I don't know why that should be any different.

It may also depend on the client side. In the past I've had problems
with some clients which couldn't see MKV files (because they didn't have
the codec). However you should recheck the server config file. Does it
list all the places you keep content? What happens if you put an MKV
file in the MP4 directory? Does it show up or not? It would be helpful
to know what server you're using now. As I said before, minidlna is very
easy to set up.

I don't have a separate directory per format, but use directories for
TV, Movies, Home Video etc.

poc