UPnP / DLNA Media Server for Windows 2008?

So, I finally picked up a PlayStation 3. It supports photos, music and video via UPnP. I have all of my media on a Windows Server 2008 box.

Are there any good, free (preferably) UPnP media servers that run on Windows Server 2008? It would have to run as a service, because I'm never logged into that box.

In fact, does W2K8 have anything built in?

I'd be surprised if it didn't, at least as an installable option of some sort. In 2000 and Vista, you get Windows Media Connect (though IIRC in recent Windows versions it's lost its independent brand and is presented as part of Media Player), which is actually a jolly good UPnP/DLNA MediaServer service.

I can't really recommend mine just yet for your use case, as it doesn't do video or photos, just audio.

Peter

I did a google search for: playstation 3 media server software

The first page of hits has everything you need. This and/or this should be enough to get you going.

I did similar, and wasn't convinced. I don't want to install Nero on my server, because it's bloated crap. I could try installing WMP 11, but I can't find anything definitive that says it'll work unattended.

There's also the problem that the PS3 originally had a limited set of supported formats. This has probably improved with later firmware updates, but who knows?

Anything MPEG (1,2,4) including H.264/AVC for audio and video should work out of the box with any firmware version. Full Divx support was also added in recent updates, including the early Divx 3 support. Also, WMV should play, but I'm not sure exactly what versions as I tend to avoid keeping anything in a proprietary MS video or audio format.

I use TVersity which is free and runs as a service (at least in XP).

One thing you should be aware of is that you should set it to not transcode photos. The PS3 can handle large pics with no problem.

Well-timed thread. I've just set up a server in the basement that I intend to turn into a media server, and TVersity looks like it might do the trick nicely.

It says it works with the PS3 natch, but it also says it'll work with the DirecTV HR20 (I've got a '21 but whatever). Does that mean that it'll serve up programs stored on the DirecTV box, or does it mean that it'll serve up media *to* the DirecTV box? It was hard to tell from the web site.

I'd also like to figure out how to integrate my Rio Central into that equation. I'm seriously considering writing some kind of app that will translate media-center type stuff into Rio Central requests. I'm pretty clear on the URL query format for the Rio Central (thanks to Roger IIRC), I just need to figure out a way to integrate a back end into something like TVersity. Then my PS3 and my DirecTV box could browse and play music directly from the central, rather than needing to keep yet another copy of my MP3s on the media server.

Anyone have any ideas of really *easy* ways to go about something like that?

The next release of Chorale should be able to serve Central/Empeg content to UPnP clients, at least when running on Linux, maybe Windows too. What OS were you intending for the media server?

It won't ever be 100% seamless, as UPnP can express queries which the more restricted Central/Receiver protocol can't. But the basic stuff should work.

Peter

It's Windows Server 2003. I'll look up Chorale and find out more about it. (It's Linux-only, I'll bet, knowing my luck.)

Looks like it *is* available as an installable Windows service. But I don't see anything on the Chorale page about the functionality I'm curious about. I only see it talking about how it can serve Rio Receivers.

I was looking for something that's the opposite of a Receiver-server emulator. I'm looking for a middleman program that will sit on the network and process UPNP media requests, forward them on to the Central, and deliver the resulting content back to the requestor.

Your post seemed to indicate that you understood that's what I was looking for, so clearly you've got inside knowledge about development of Chorale. Chorale's sourceforge page isn't very helpful to me though: it keeps saying "no matches found" when I try to browse for feature additions in its tracker. Are you involved with the Chorale development, and can you give me more information about how this is configured and how it works?

The operative word was "next": it doesn't do the forwarding thing yet.

Peter

Is that the sound of a beta-tester volunteering that I hear?

Peter

Ahh, who am I kidding? Is that the sound of my entire user-base for that feature that I hear?

Peter

Absolutely!

It appears as though TVersity is an utter failure in this department. Everything I try to stream to the PS3, it says "The Data Is Corrupted".

Any other media servers for Server 2003?

I'd spend less time in trying to make a device like a PS3 with Sony software streaming media and more time finding a good client to run a supported device. Such as Boxee (XBMC) which runs on a number of platforms.

That said ORB works with anything with a web browser. User experience is gong to suck though.

I'd rather spend a bit and have a usable end result than trying to cope with a really kludgy solution. I'm still really liking my SageTV and Media Extender, especially with the latest software updates.

TVersity seems to be working OK for me on Windows 2008, but I've only tried photos and MP3 audio so far. What formats are you attempting to use?

Yeah, but then I'd need an HTPC, and I've had no end of problems with those, so I've given up.

Tversity works fine if we're talking about playing movies off of a hard disk. For instance, I've got some Doctor Who episodes on a hard disk that TVersity streams perfectly to my Playstation 3.

It's only when I try to use TVersity's features for streaming internet video to the PS3 that is messes up. For example, when you install TVersity, it comes built-in with episodes of Jericho, MacGyver, and Star Trek. You can also point it at a given Youtube account (for instance, I pointed it at youtube user sweetafton23). The PS3 lists the episodes and/or youtube videos, and even pulls down thumbnail pictures of each one. It's only after I select one of them to play that it says "The Data is Corrupted".

The status screen of the TVersity server appears to be trying to transcode them (as it should... FLV to MPG), and the transcoding seems to be progressing, but then it stalls out when the PS3 errors out.

I'm trying to get help from their forum, but so far nothing useful.

Na, you just need an AppleTV or an XBox to install Boxee or XBMC.

Or for a little more power, but still easy to deal with under a TV, a HTMAC, err, Mac Mini.

The AppleTV is decent, but I'm wanting my Mini back under the TV now. Mostly due to the sluggishness of the device when running Boxee or other 3rd party software.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, I haven't really played with TVersity outside of streaming a couple HDD based videos or with the PS3 for browsing. Any reason you don't just browse to the internet video stream on the PS3 natively?

I didn't suggest a Mac mini because that's sort of the HTPC I thought Roger wouldn't want. Having to get another machine instead of using a piece of software intended for a machine you already have. Though I suppose one with a PS3 doesn't necessarily have an Xbox...

Orb is another app that does streaming to most devices.

If I was going to go the mini route I'd probably use the mini as the server/media machine and something else for the playback. WD has a streamer for under $150. At under $300 I'd still suggest the Sage Theatre with their HTPC/server software running on the mini to serve everything up.

I think it's going to be longer than the end of the year before we see those low-priced NVIDIA Ion systems able to compete. They all seem to go for a lot more money right now.

Yes, a few reasons:

1. The web browser on the PS3 is awful. Joystick control for a mouse pointer is terrible. Entering URLs with a joystick is even worse.

2. No full screen for videos when using PS3 web browser. At least they don't work when I try them.

3. I like the idea of organizing all video content into one nice menu structure browsable easily by joystick or remote, regardless of source location.

4. I like the idea of being able to set up RSS feeds of my favorite regularly-updated videos (like Zero Punctuation) and select them without having to navigate to the web page.

5. Once I get the PS3's streaming issues solved, I want to get the same thing working for my DirecTV HR21 (which also has similar problems to the PS3 when attempting to stream video, so I'm guessing if I solve the PS3's problems I'll also solve the HR21's problems). Then I would be able to go from Tivo'd programs, to live TV, to internet video, all from one interface with my remote control.

6. I like the idea of doing all of the above from the PS3 and/or the HR21 more than using my Mac Mini for the same purpose. I can browse all this stuff from the Mac Mini right now. It's all just so much easier from the game console or DVR. The technology for the convergence is here, the software just needs to start working right.

7. It's supposed to work the way I'm expecting it to work.

I'll see if I can make it run on Server 2003.

Aha. Okay, I tried out Orb. It had the same problem as TVersity.

Looking at the way Orb works, I decided I don't want to use it, I like the way TVersity works better. So I want to get TVersity working.

But here's the awesome part: I solved the problem in TVersity, thanks to Orb. Orb had this entry in their knowledge base. This solved the problem in TVersity. I was Remote Desktop'd into the media server, and that screwed up the streaming because it hijacked the audio driver on the server. Fix that problem and boom, all the streaming works all of a sudden.

Nice Tony. I only briefly tried Orb last week when searching for a way for a friend to stream music from his PC to his iPod Touch. I set him up with Simplify Media instead, but thought it might be useful to you because it also does video which was what you were after.

I remember it getting a lot of media attention a while back as one of the first solutions to stream to devices like the Wii and PS3.

How is the TVersity setup if you only intend to use it for music? I may have my friend look at that one too because I've also just found a more generic UPnP app for the iPhone/iPod. I think Simplify Media is proprietary - though it does offer the advantage of allowing a remote user to use iTunes (or WinAmp, etc..)

I haven't yet used TVersity for music, so I don't know how it is. It's my goal to use Peter's Chorale server for the music, instead. (Hope I can get them running side by side.)

Interesting. My server doesn't have an audio driver (because it's a Hyper-V guest). I wonder if that'll cause problems later...

Dunno! I made sure mine had an audio driver.

I messed with TVersity a bunch, but I can't get it to transcode Quicktime MOV files into a format that works on the PS3.

The TVersity forums have some topics about that, but it's a mess and I can't figure out how to make it work.

Anyone have any experience with that, or can offer a good alternative to TVersity that works on Server2003?

Much like .AVI, .MOV is just a generic container that can contain upteen billion different types of audio or video codecs. Knowing what the actual codecs are will probably help expose what the problem is.

(coming back to this after a break)

Do you have a favorite tool to determine what the codecs are inside a given movie file? Digging into the file properties menus of Quicktime and Windows Media Player doesn't seem to offer enough detail for me.

GSpot works for AVI files. It might work for MOVs.

Thanks! I'll give that a try.

I don't really use a utility outside Command-I in the Finder or Quicktime. With a Mac Mini under the TV and Perian, formats still haven't been much of a concern.

WMV support via Quicktime remains terrible. The import process using Flip4Mac is atrocious.

I've used a program called AVICodec with good success.

Edit: upon further scrutiny, it looks like it's been 2 years since the last build. Looks like perhaps it's been merged into MediaInfo? (last release 4/17/09)

Thanks for the link to that program John. Should come in mighty handy on both Windows and Mac OS.

I've just been using ffmpegx and QuickTime Player to check info on any given file.

BItt, what do you mean the "import process" when using Flip4Mac's WMV decoder? The last WMV files I've played "just worked" transparently with QuickTime Player.

I do prefer to use MPlayer if I can though, since it supports convenient skipping instead of FFWD/REW.

I'll have to get home before I can be precise, but whenever I try to play a WMV via Quicktime/Flip4Mac, it pops up a progress bar that details its import or conversion process. With videos of any length, it takes many minutes before it even starts playing video.

I too get the progress bar when opening WMV files. Most of the time it's quite quick but on occasion it's annoyingly slow. Nowadays I come across very few WMVs, I've pretty much banned the creation of them at work.

It might have something to do with the fact that I keep my videos on a network share. Maybe it's processing the entire thing before it starts playing.

Coming back to this thread after a while...

I'm now running a fairly successful media server installation that combines TVersity and Chorale.

I can:

- Play any video or audio file stored on the server's local hard disk or on shared network drives. Including my entire Rio-Central-hosted music collection, thanks to Peter's Chorale software.

- Play many types of video streams from the internet, such as YouTube videos and TV episodes, including Hulu videos.

- Play all of the above things on my Playstation 3, Xbox 360, or DirecTV DVR. Some of the videos play directly (if the playback device natively supports the codec), others get transcoded on-the-fly by TVersity.

There are significant limitations to all of the above, though. Part of the problem is that the spare computer I chose for the media server happens to be an old POS without decent memory or CPU. So the hulu videos are slideshows, and if something needs to be transcoded, you've got to wait for it to buffer and there is a slight degradation that happens in the transcoding process. If I were to upgrade the server, those problems would be mitigated.

For most situations, such as just watching an MPEG video file, it works great: No transcoding, things Just Work.

It was surprisingly difficult to get it all working correctly though! Here's some things I had to do:

- TVersity comes with a codec pack, but it wasn't enough. I needed to install CCCP as well, and I had to install TVersity and CCCP in the right order. I also had to install Quicktime and Real Alternative so I could get those codecs. And I had to tweak all of the codec settings (mostly just enabling video and audio codecs that were disabled by default). I had a collection of random video files of all different codec types, and there were many that stumped the system until I poked around in the codec settings to make them work. There are still a few holdouts that continue to stump the system, but for now it plays a majority of my files. The GSpot program that Bitt linked was invaluable in helping me locate the codec issues.

- The codecs can't handle it if you're remote-desktopped into the server computer with the option enabled to redirect the audio to your remote desktop client. This was the reason for all of my "Data is Corrupted" messages on the PS3. All I had to do was reconfigure my remote desktop session so that it didn't try to stream me the audio, and then the transcoders worked properly.

- Of the three devices, the PS3 seems to be the best at playing media. It plays the most media types and has the fewest problems with the streaming. The Xbox and DirecTV DVR sometimes mess up playback in various ways. Also, the Xbox can't see Chorale, but the PS3 can. Not sure why.

Anyway. Fun times.

Thanks for the summary Tony. You'd cemented in my mind that UPnP isn't universal, is generally a mess, and not worth really investing any time in exploring. I'd come to a similar conclusion after seeing the general state of affairs with clients - there simply don't seem to be any good ones - certainly nothing that comes even close to what I'm already using.

Proprietary is definitely the way to go. I mean, the proprietary system can be open source, but there doesn't seem to be any "standard" that's worth anything at all except as a sticker or check-box on some product literature or packaging.

For the record, the problems I encountered have nothing to do with UPNP. All of that worked fine. The clients never had a problem seeing the server or communicating with the server.

My only problems were related to trying to cobble together many disparate media sources and trying to get them to *all* play on one consumer device. It's really the whole transcoding thing that's the issue, not UPNP itself.

Let me be even more specific: The UPNP standard is pretty great, in that it lets a consumer device like the Playstation detect a media server and voilà, it plays the files.

The only problem comes when you've got crap for the files. Software like TVersity goes a long way towards solving that problem, it's just not the perfect solution yet. It's about as close as it gets, though, from what I've seen.

Anyone know of a *better* solution than TVersity?

But the connectivity is just a small part of the whole solution. Most consumers would expect the whole thing to just work and it doesn't seem to judging from the difficulties expressed elsewhere as well.

You've pointed out the specific downfall, which is playback. The solution isn't "universal" if it can only handle a small number of file formats and codecs. Most consumers won't accept that the "universal" nomenclature applies only to the ability to see the shares on the network.

In the end what's supposed to be a simplification ends up being a complication in that one is stuck being able to play some files but not others, then being able to play a different set with yet a different client, etc.

And if that weren't enough, then even media playback applications that are otherwise decent at format support stumble on UPnP - Boxee for instance (reading some random sampling of forum posts). At that point one can just forgo the UPnP and just create a regular share which programs like Boxee or Plex will happily connect to and play from.

I keep reading about people trying to cobble things together along with fielding questions from friends about this type of setup. Some of these people are trying DVD players with USB, consoles and other pokey solutions like running apps on an iPod to connect to a music hare on a household PC. At least for music I can give them a universal answer - SqueezeBox or if you want a whiter-looking solution and private wireless network, Sonos. For video it's a little bit more mixed, but the only thing out there I can recommend with any confidence that doesn't use a PC at the TV is that Sage Extender box I've mentioned. Otherwise Boxee or Plex (which are both based on XBMC) seem to be the best bet.

I'm having a nightmare at the moment. I've been storing all my video and audio files on my ReadyNAS and playing them back on my PS3. Up until recently it's worked really well with the PS3 playing pretty much everything I've thrown at it. A couple of weeks ago I updated the firmware on the PS3 and ever since 95% of my media is now unplayable.

Yes, the designers of UPnP have somehow managed to make it both over-engineered and under-specified.


UPnP also falls under the same rule of thumb as IMAP mail: that people who don't realise that what they're designing is a remote filesystem, are destined to design a crap remote filesystem.


Yes. Squeezebox have certainly solved the audio problem; Sonos might have too, but I know less about Sonos (do you get server plug-ins like the Squeezebox ones?). If you don't care about video or photo, then you now no longer need a universal remote to control audio playback, nor an amplifier with more than one input.

Nobody that I know of has yet solved the video problem as definitively, and of course what you actually want (because video has an audio track too) is for your audio solution and your video solution to be the same thing, so, again, no universal remote is required, and your TV and your audio amplifier both spend their entire lives switched to just one input. (Um, unless you do gaming; maybe if you do, you just need to hope that the Xbox and/or PS3 UPnP clients are worth using.)

The reason I pay attention to UPnP, is that it seems to me that whoever does solve the video problem first, will likely do so using UPnP. The Squeezebox stuff doesn't obviously extend to video, and Sonos is UPnP, albeit with some proprietary extensions. And even so there'll be servers that can't serve certain content, and clients that can't play certain other content. But if there's ever even so much as one good server and one good client, that's the problem better-solved than it has been yet.

Peter

Interesting.

If you can A/B a playable versus an unplayable file and look at the codecs with GSpot (linked above) you might be able to find out what's up.

Does the ReadyNAS try to detect that you've got a playstation, and then transcode (or deliberately not transcode) for it? Maybe the firmware upgrade makes the ReadyNAS fail to detect it properly.

Good point.

I do, however, like TVersity's ability to let me set up things like Video RSS feeds and other web-based video/audio sources which it can then turn around and feed to my playback client. That's something a simple fileshare can't do.

I have been playing with Boxee a lot lately and I'm excited about it. Out of the box, without any configuration, there is an absolute ton of free media available to you.

On the plus side, you don't have to run a separate server to handle transcoding. As a result, your files look better and load much quicker.

The downside is you need an AppleTV, Intel Mac, or Ubuntu Linux box. The AppleTV is cheap and quiet, but it also chokes on a lot of HD material over 720p. Mac Mini is appealing for its size, quietness, and bundled features (optical audio), but it's costly compared to the AppleTV. Ubuntu Linux box is probably the cheapest of them all since many of us will have something lying around. The problem is making a PC quiet and having it look like it belongs in your media rack.

I'm actually going to give Boxee a shot on an old P4 2.4GHz machine running Ubuntu Jaunty tonight. Hopefully it goes as smoothly as the Mac installs have gone.

Yeah, the Boxee thing sounds fun, but I've already got a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV that plays all this media just fine. I just liked the idea of my game consoles and my DVR *also* being able to play the media.

It's been documented on several forums and been reported to Sony by other users. The ReadyNAS doesn't do any transcoding as far as I'm aware, it just serves the files. I can't be bothered to go through the files and figure out which codecs it no longer plays, life's too short to sit down and do that. Suffice it to say my folder of Sarah Connor Chronicles I bittorrented no longer play.

What ReadyNAS firmware do you have? There was a semi recent update (4.1.5) that swapped out the UPnP server software.

An update to this thread. A firmware upgrade on the NAS didn't seem to fix things. However, a system update on the PS3 has. So I'm going to be very careful in future when updates come out for the PS3.

If it happened again I'd probably consider a purpose-built uPnP STB like the Netgear EVA series.

Ah. Yeah. I haven't downloaded that system update yet. I wonder if it will solve a few playback issues I've had on a few odd file formats I've got?