Free DLNA serv­er which works good with my Sony BRAVIA TV

In sev­er­al pre­vi­ous posts I wrote about my quest for the right source for­mat to stream video to my Sony BRAVIA TV (build in 2009). The last week-end I final­ly found some­thing which sat­is­fies me.

What I found was servi­io, a free UPnP-AV (DLNA) serv­er. It is writ­ten in java and runs on Win­dows, Lin­ux and FreeB­SD (it is not list­ed on the web­site, but we have an not-so-up-to-date ver­sion in the ports tree). If nec­es­sary it transcodes the input to an appro­pri­ate for­mat for the DLNA ren­der­er (in my case the TV).

I test­ed it with my slow Net­book, so that I was able to see with which input for­mat it will just remux the input con­tain­er to a MPEG trans­port stream, and which input for­mat would be real­ly re-encoded to a for­mat the TV understands.

The bot­tom line of the tests is, that I just need to use a sup­port­ed con­tain­er (like MKV or MP4 or AVI) with H.264-encoded video (e.g. encod­ed by x264) and AC3 audio.

The TV is able to chose between sev­er­al audio streams, but I have not test­ed if servi­io is able to serve files with mul­ti­ple audio streams (my wife has a dif­fer­ent moth­er lan­guage than me, so it is inter­est­ing for us to have mul­ti­ple audio streams for a movie), and I do not know if DLNA sup­ports some­thing like this.

Now I just have to replace minidl­na (which only works good with my TV for MP3s and Pic­tures) with servi­io on my FreeB­SD file serv­er and we can for­get about the disk-juggling.

6 thoughts on “Free DLNA serv­er which works good with my Sony BRAVIA TV”

  1. ltsampros says:

    After hav­ing jug­gled with many media servers I found this one as the best in terms of capabilities: 

    http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/

    Out of the box cbz/cbr sup­port for Pic­tures real­ly impressed me as now I just lay back and enjoy comics on the big screen.

    Haven’t test­ed it with FreeB­SD yet but I don’t remem­ber any Linux-only dependencies.

    1. netchild says:

      Last time I tried the PS3 Medi­aserv­er it did­n’t suit my needs. In the servi­io forum I’ve seen some post­ings which told that they switched from PS3 Medi­aserv­er. Well… as long as it suits your needs, every­thing should be fine. servi­io suits mine now.

  2. Warner Losh says:

    Are you able to transcode AAC for some­thing that works with the Sony DVD play­ers? minidl­na worked well enough, except for that one detail…

    1. netchild says:

      They list Sony Bluer­ay play­ers on their com­pat­i­bil­i­ty list, but I do not see DVD play­ers listed.
      It is not an exhaus­tive list, my TV is not list­ed but works, and you can mod­i­fy the device-profile to suit your needs. You can use the Intel UPnP tools (Device Spy) to deter­mine what kind of for­mats the device sup­ports (needs a Win­dows machine). With this it should be easy to let it transcode AAC to LPCM or MP3. I think the DVD play­er should at least be able to under­stand LPCM.

  3. Bops says:

    Thanks @ltsampros
    PS3MediaServer is the best DLNA serv­er out there.
    It does what it should best. Play video well with­out stutters.

    http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/
    No fan­cy video and pic­ture listing.
    Just a sim­ple fold­er list. Go around and find your file.

  4. Warner Losh says:

    I haven’t tried PS3 Media Serv­er, to be hon­est, but Servi­io is a huge step up in func­tion­al­i­ty and per­for­mance from minidl­na. That step up comes at the cost of flex­i­bil­i­ty (like how do set the meta­da­ta for files it has guessed wrong on?), but it works with all my media play­ing devices in the house from my phones, to my iPad to my Sony DVD play­er and DirecTV DVR.

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