Streaming media from DLNA server
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Hello, first time poster here, but long time reader. So I want to work on a project that will help me learn a little about networking and working with multimedia. The project I want to try to create is an application that can connect to a DLNA server (such as Plex Media Server) and stream multimedia (video, audio, images) from that server.
Does anyone have any clue about how this can be accomplished? I searched all over the Web, but ultimately came up dry. Qt seems to be a great tool for both networking and multimedia, so I'm hoping it has the necessary things for doing this.
I would appreciate any kind of help regarding this subject. I really don't even know where to start. Any advice, resources, or just general discussion on this matter would be really appreciated. This seems like a really fun project to work on, but I think I need a little help getting the ball rolling.
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Hi and welcome to devnet,
You might be interested by VLC-Qt. AFAIK VLC is capable of handling that task so I guess that the library has everything needed for that. VLC-Qt is a wrapper library that gives a Qt API over VLC.
Hope it helps
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Thank you for the reply. I was thinking about using libvlc too since VLC does have that feature in the Universal Plug'n'play section. I've looked through libvlc and VLC-Qt, but I really don't see anything about it. I think VLC is using some UPnP library to accomplish this though. I suppose I could try to find a good C++ UPnP library, but even then I'm still not sure how to accomplish streaming from a DLNA server. There doesn't seem to me any resources on the subject. None that I can find at least.
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I just had a doubt: you do want to write a client to read the stream, right ?
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Yeah the goal is basically to create a media player that can stream from a DLNA server (such as Plex Media Server or any other media server). So yes, a client to access the server, get the information about the media (name, metadata, folder/library structure, etc.), and stream the media to the media player. If you've ever used Roku, I basically want to at least be able to do what the Roku Media Player can do with media servers.
By the way, thank you for mentioning VLC-Qt. I think I'm going to use that for handling the media. It looks really nice and easy to use. :)
Perhaps this is a little over my head. This is just an experimental project that I may end up using for viewing my own media if it succeeds. I'll probably end up wanting to run it on a Raspberry Pi 2 or something. My first task is just to try and figure out how to stream from a DLNA server.
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I've never used one but I know the device. You should try to contact the VLC team to see with them how they proceed with the UPnP/DLNA part.