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?
