On 08/08/18 16:14, Marc Espie wrote:
On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 11:30:52AM -0700, Jordan Geoghegan wrote:
I know minidlna is in ports, but it doesn't do on the fly media
transcoding/remuxing with FFmpeg nor does it have an integrated HTML5 video
player like Serviio does. I tried minidlna, but it unfortunately doesnt work
for me as my devices need the transcoding/remuxing feature that Serviio
offers. For example, my bluray player refuses to playback most video
containers over DLNA (mp4, mkv etc) but will play most video formats (AVC,
Xvid, mpeg2 etc) all it needs is for the video files to be remuxed into an
M2TS or AVI container, which Serviio is able to do on the fly without
transcoding. It's also useful for making my H265 content available on my
older devices that don't natively support the newer codecs/containers. I
also quite enjoy the HTML5 video player, as it allows me to watch my movies
on the go. It's annoying that it's proprietary, but at least it works well
on OpenBSD.
Tip: devices like android tablets or the XBox One don't necessarily advertize
it, but they DO have VLC, and it's fairly happy with most x265 content.
The only issue I've had with ldna service so far is the need to remux subtitles
into an mp4/mkv because separate .srt files do not work.
That's fairly easy to do and rather permanent. Out of a fairly large sample
of video files, I can say that VLC on those devices handles everything but
maybe 0.05%.
Yes VLC is an amazing program and I use it heavily. MiniDLNA is also a
great project. Unfortunately VLC isn't available for Xbox 360. MiniDLNA
doesn't work very good for my BDP S5200 bluray players or my Xbox 360
devices (of which my family owns over half a dozen) as they require AVI,
M2TS or WMV containers respectively. It isn't feasible for me to
remux/transcode my 10TB media library (which is comprised mostly of mkv)
just so I can watch cartoons on my living room TV. Granted I could just
build a dedicated OpenBSD media streaming box, but that isn't a feasible
solution for my mother or my technophobe sister who both live on the
other side of the country from me. It was easy enough for me to just set
up a small machine next to their router and just scp new shows over to
them as needed, where Serviio then detects the new content and
automatically adds it to their library; From there it can then be
accessed on their smart TV, bluray player, 360, computer or iPad either
at home or abroad.
MiniDLNA and VLC also don't really have an equivalent to Serviio's HTML5
streaming server. It is nice to be able to just pop open a browser and
have access to all my media on my home server. I like that Serviio can
parse movie/TV show names and connect to IMDB / TVDB to grab relevant
metadata and cover art for my files. It is nice to see my files
optionally presented with actual correct episode names, rather than
"S01E03$TVShowName$TorrentersName". I find that the video metadata makes
wading through 10,000+ movies and TV episodes a much more pleasant
experience, as I can search by year, actor, genre etc. Another neat
feature it offers is the ability to automatically download subtitles for
all your videos and either on-the-fly transcode the file to burn them
in, or remux on-the-fly to embed the subtitles. On my home server, I run
Serviio in a vmm(4) virtual machine with read-only NFS access to my
media library. Proprietary software is bad ju ju, but I find Serviio to
be a preferable all in one solution to Plex, as I can at least run it on
my favourite OS.
