DLNA connectivity, HTC Desire streaming and remote HTPC

[trinityEon]

Hi all,

I love my toys and especially when they all talk to each other. I currently have my home wired, with my whole (Legal)DVD collection ripped, onto LAN hard drives, I use 2 Samsung B650 TV with LAN and DLNA, my destop PC, wifes laptop and mine.

now i am not sure if this would be the correct place for posting this, but I can remotely from my Desire, stream movies to and from various sources in my homegroup. IE control and push movies, music, pics to my TV, from my desire through the DLNA. i can even remotely control the TV volume from the cellphone. My Apps (http://www.appbrain.com/user/trinityEon/apps-on-the-phone)

Windows 7 media centre is quite buggy, and for some reason it keeps freezing my desktop, So i have decided to go with a free Mediaportal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) and XBMC (http://xbmc.org/). No doubt XBMC works like a charm with full DLNA support, even a full android remote controller app, that is easy to use. However XBMC(only downfall of this Xbox supported product) does not support TV server facility like Mediaportal.

Mediaportal trumps with the ability to be able to stream TV to any device on the network that has the ability, the number of simultaneous channels you can view depends on the number of tuners you are using. currently my wife can sit in the kitchen with her laptop open, and stream TV from my desktop server, while the kids watch normal TV in the room, and I can push video from my LAN drive to my other TV in the lounge all from my cellphone. The TV supports you tube, twitter, news, stocks, and weather from the LAN natively.

I would like to know from everyone, if you are willing to share, how far you guys have managed to get connectivity and your toys to talk to each other, what in your opinion is the best rated apps you prefer using.

Also Samsung TV's even have the ability to display your text messages on the screen, but for the life of me i cannot get it to work, as samsung also use android, so i wonder what app they using.

My Media layout:

2x Samsung B650
1x MVIX HD
1x Desktop PC witth Windows 7, and Media center.
2x laptops with media center
1x HTC desire
1x n95 nokia
1x n97 nokia (pity nokia took out the DLNA function they had in the n95 )

[alchamy]

I don't use DLNA simply because only one of my panels has support so I took a different approach using MythTV and XBMC but it may still be useful.

I know MythTV supports uPNP already and DLNA has made an appearance in the latest versions but there are still issues being ironed out. Out of interest I checked now and my Samsung automatically picks up the MythTV server but spews errors about format so I assume it can work with some effort.

My Media Layout is as follows;

FreeNAS server for storage (Supports uPNP, DAAP etc)
Zoneminder - CCTV
MythTV (mythbuntu) server for tuners (2 x DVB-S2 and 1 x DVB-T)
3 XBMC frontends on ubuntu (supports myth natively)

I use an addon for XBMC to syncronize the watched flag and play counts between the frontends and use NFO files to keep the 3 frontend libraries in sync. The frontends are all diskless running the xbmc frontend only from 2gb CF cards. I can also confirm that some of the android apps are able to control multiple XBMC installs which is nice.

[trinityEon]

Cool, it sounds interesting, though i found mythTV as a pay HTPC solution, i was not sure it would work with my setup hence i went with the route of DLNA...still trying to find out how to get the SMS messages to appear on the TV through DLNA

[stufan]

I have HTC Desire and I use it as my primary digital camera mainly because I hate to carry multiple devices with me. As a result I generated tones of pictures on the device. I also have Playstation 3 and the most convenient way to view my phone pics on the bigger TV screen is via DLNA. I use media server iMediaShare which is totally free at Android Market.

[Cloud]

I have a PC with an external 2TB HDD connected to a WiFi router. What is the simplest, easiest way for me to stream movies / tv series to my Desire?

[trinityEon]

I have a PC with an external 2TB HDD connected to a WiFi router. What is the simplest, easiest way for me to stream movies / tv series to my Desire?
Have you connected the drive as a LAN disk? if you running windows 7 just setup a home network, and share it as a media drive, then use estrongs FE to browse to your shared folder, and play with rock player

[Cloud]

Brilliant, will give it a go tonight TrinityEon.

[Cloud]

........then use estrongs FE to browse to your shared folder, and play with rock player

I browse there, but it won't open the file. Rock player is installed. When I open Rock player, I cannot browse to the network folder.

It is like FE does not associate the files with Rock player.