recently i acquired a sony bdv-e370 home theater which originally didn’t ship with DLNA support. a recent firmware update as of 2/2011 added DLNA support. which was awesome because it was a feature i wanted, but at the time was not willing to pay an extra $100 for the sony bdv-e570 to get it.

so then it was time to find a free linux based upnp/dlna mediaserver…luckily there are several. i’ve tried mediatomb, ushare, coherence, and minidlna. i had the most success with coherence and minidlna (minidlna seems to be based on aspects of coherence). there is also a coherence plugin available for totem and rhythmbox in gnome. some quick edits of the configuration files of minidlna and coherence allowed me to serve up multimedia files to the bdv-e370. a common problem i’ve had was getting any video files presented that were not mpegs. seems like that’s all the device wants to recognize, despite being able to play several formats. files can be transcoded into mpegs by using ffmpeg (ffmpeg -i movie.avi -target ntsc-dvd new.mpg). if an error occurs during that conversion try installing the ffmpeg unstripped packages.

update 1/11/2012:
i had abandoned this project for a long time because i had deemed it not that useful. i recently revisited it and updated to the latest minidlna (1.0.22) and there has been at least one sony firmware update since my original post. so what’s changed? the newest version of minidlna is now allowing the device to see more video formats. i can now see .avi and .mkv files (possibly others). that’s pretty awesome. the downside is that some videos, now visible, still can’t play. the device will claim that the file is corrupted. most likely the file uses a codec that the device doesn’t support. the near dvd quality videos skipped like crazy, but i’m fairly sure that’s because i’m streaming over wifi (wireless-N, but a weak signal). the device i’m running minidlna on is directly wired to the router. also a certain video played one frame and then locked up the sony device completely…i’m talking like a hard freeze. the power button wouldn’t even turn it off, i had to pull the power cable. so all and all, DLNA support on the sony device is a cool feature, but in its current state still not that useful for me. it’s less of a hassle to just watch the videos on my laptop. hopefully future firmware updates will continue to improve this feature.