Stream multimedia from DLNA server using Qt

[JordanHarris]

Hello, first time poster here, but long time reader. So I want to work on a project that will help me learn a little about networking and working with multimedia. The project I want to try to create is an application that can connect to a DLNA server (such as Plex Media Server) and stream multimedia (video, audio, images) from that server.

Does anyone have any clue about how this can be accomplished? I searched all over the Web, but ultimately came up dry. Qt seems to be a great tool for both networking and multimedia, so I'm hoping it has the necessary things for doing this.

I would appreciate any kind of help regarding this subject. I really don't even know where to start. Any advice, resources, or just general discussion on this matter would be really appreciated. This seems like a really fun project to work on, but I think I need a little help getting the ball rolling.

[jefftee]

To get started, Plex offers a RESTful API. Unfortunately it's not very well documented IMHO. Here are a couple of links to get you started:

https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/art...r-URL-Commands
https://code.google.com/archive/p/pl...IOverview.wiki

I have written code that uses QProcess to transcode video using ffmpeg to a format that Google Chromcast seems to play pretty consistently w/o Plex having to transcode on the fly. When the transcode is finished, I then tell Plex to "refresh" the section (TV Shows, Home Movies, Movies, etc) that contains the transcoded video. I have not tried to stream the media from Plex at all, so perhaps there is not API that does that for you, but you can certainly get access to all of the metadata regarding Plex media and you can get the URL to the media itself, etc.

Hope this at least gets you started and pointed in the right direction.

Good luck.

[JordanHarris]

Thank you for the reply. Well I don't really mean that I want it to stream just from the Plex Media Server. I just mean any server that supports DLNA, such as Plex Media Server when it's enabled. That is very cool that you can get metadata from Plex though. I might have to specialize the application when using it with PMS, or just use another way of getting metadata of possible.

I'm trying to search around to see how DLNA sirens exactly and how you can connect to it and stream from it. I really can't find much about it though. Perhaps I'm just not searching the right things. I think VLC can stream from a DLNA server, so I might have to try and figure out how it's doing it and possibly use libvlc if it provides that functionality. I did try looking at the docs and source code, but haven't found anything yet. It seems to be quite a difficult task so far (figuring out how it all works)

My hopes at this point is to create a little media player device the can stream local media from a server. Maybe using a Raspberry Pi and a somewhat minimal Linux distro to "power" the device. I use both Plex and the Roku and I'm quite inspired by the two products. Hopefully I been figure it out because it would be such a fun and educational project.