Developing a personal/private media player
Hi, hew here to the developer forum. For a while I was trying to use a Plex Media server running on TerraMaster, to save time I won't go into the reasons I want to replace Plex for my personal media,...
Forum Discussion
What are you using for the media source? DLNA server, network share, or something else? I would be interested in something that works with DLNA.
It’s a nodejs express server using http. The database view creates the content feed which contains urls to each media file. The nodejs app calls the database query, modifies the result for subtitles, and delivers it to the Roku app. Then the Roku app calls the url for a specific media file and the nodejs server serves it from the local file system.
I’m not very familiar with DLNA servers. I set up minidlna to see how the built in Roku media player app worked but my from what I remember it was listing files based on embedded metadata within the file. I didn’t dig into how series, seasons, and episodes would work. A full content feed seemed like the better approach for me.
At least with my DLNA server (Serviio) it gets the metadata from the server's database, which has been scraped from the Internet using themoviedb.org. How exactly DLNA connects to the player, I've never gotten that far into the weeds. I did write the profiles Serviio uses for Roku devices (and a couple of other brands) to transcode when necessary. That's probably the biggest advantage of DLNA, the ability to transcode only what is necessary. Of course, Plex, Emby and Jellyfin all do that as well, but using a proprietary method. DLNA is public.
You raise an interesting point. My app’s backend server is designed specifically for the Roku app to consume. You wouldn’t be able to use the backend output directly with an Android app for example. All this was designed to supply a content feed from Roku’s documentation. No idea if other OS apps would require a content feed. A full fledged media server that recognizes devices and transcodes on the fly sounds more far more robust than anything I was willing to take on. All of my media is either mp4 or mkv. Both of which are playable directly through the built in video player on Roku.
Yeah, my media server is mostly DVD/BD rips, but also some OTA recorded movies/ TV episodes. The rips are almost all in either in MKV or M2TS containers, with many codecs that aren’t supported by Roku (mostly the lossless audio codecs but at least one video codec: VC-1), so transcoding is required. The OTA recordings are almost all TS containers and mpeg2 video and AC3 audio, all Roku supported. But Roku has a serious bug with their current media player with TS containers, in that they can't be paused, FF or rewound. Since Plex and the other media players can get around that problem, hopefully yours can as well.
