Re: Smart Media Player Network Access in Fedora 20

[Stephen Morris]

On 09/14/2014 11:47 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Sun, 2014-09-14 at 11:09 +1000, Stephen Morris wrote:
Note that my comments were on using DLNA. Miracast is different (and
pretty much as you describe it) since it's focussed on screen
mirroring
which is not the same concept. My TV supports Miracast and I can
mirror
my phone or tablet to the big screen, something I haven't attempted
to
do in Linux. If that's what you really want to do then ignore what I
said earlier, but you should consider if it is in fact what you want
to
do. If you just want to watch videos it may not be.
Miracast is not what I really wanted to use but under windows that
was
the only process that seemed to work, as when I configure mediaplayer
for streaming it doesn't get to the player, plus everybody I talk to
here are telling me that if I am using windows I should be using
Miracast. I figured Linux was similar, but I using wireless for
streaming and didn't want dlna streaming to be picked up by dlna
receivers by next door neighbors if that was at all possible.
Well, they're wrong. Use Miracast if you want to throw your Windows
screen onto a TV, say for a presentation. If you want to use your
computer to serve videos (or audio for that matter) to one or more
clients then you need to run a server package. I'm absolutely 100%
certain you can do this in Windows as well, in fact some of the most
popular solutions are cross-platform. There's a list of them on
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streaming_media_systems
A popular one is Plex, which runs on Win, Mac and Linux and has a whole
bunch of other features. I didn't need anything so full-featured, so I
opted for minidlna which is simple to set up.

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.
Some of my issues may be my modem/router not being good enough for
streaming as well. When I try to get the device to play a video
directly
of my NAS device over wireless the playback stops every thirty
seconds
and buffers, but if I put the flash disk that the video came from
into
the device and play the video from there it plays fine without any
buffering.
I have my NAS device and TV connected via Gigabit Ethernet to
Gigabit
ports on my router. I would only use Wifi for video streaming if I
had
no other option.
  From my perspective I don't necessarily have any other option. I
have
my NAS connected to my modem/router/voip phone device, but not by
gigabit even though the NAS ethernet is gigabit, because the router
doesn't have a gigabit port (I can upgrade the router from my isp
which
now have a device that has gigabit ports). As the device is also my
home
phone, the device is situated next to the phone socket which is in a
remote room, hence I have to use wireless unless I run cables along
the
ceiling or floor between rooms. I potentially could put a range
extender
next to the Smartmedia Player and connect the player to the extender
by
ethernet, but is that really any different to having the player
accessing the NAS over wireless?
Giga Ethernet is nice but not really necessary, however real Wifi
end-to-end bandwidth is so vulnerable to factors such as other users,
signal reflections, attentuation etc. that it's always going to be the
least desirable option. And Wifi range extenders are a waste of money
unless you're very lucky (I haven't had good results from them), not to
mention halving your bandwidth.

For fixed stations a much better alternative is Powerline Ethernet (the
standard spec is called HomePlug). They can be had for around $100-$150
for a pair, and use the house wiring to distribute the signal from your
router. They work quite well (YMMV of course). The better ones include a
Wifi access point on the remote side so they effectively act as a local
hotspot.
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. 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.

regards,
Steve


poc



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