DLNA Servers for Android and Ubuntu

When the family came to visit it would have be nice to see a few photographs displayed on the PS3. I still haven’t worked out how to get photographs from youface displayed in any meaningful way on the PS3. The web-browser is simply awful but the DNLA functionality seems relatively organised. Servers for various devices I have tried are:

  • For Ubuntu 12.04 MiniDLNA.  I pretty much followed the instructions at Dennis Conrad’s Blog but I kept the default installation file much more like the default.
  • For Android on a Sony Tablet S I used Pixel DMS.  To be honest I was pretty disappointed that a Sony Tablet can’t communicate with a Sony Games Console by default.  Especially when the Tablet is “Playstation Certified” whatever that means – clearly it doesn’t mean it supports a 10 year old standard (pioneered by Sony!!) for media sharing out of the box!  I’m sure that the fine people who make Pixel DMS are great and good but I don’t like installing random 3rd party binaries to get basic functionality sorted out.  However Pixel DMS appears to do the job just fine.

Whilst I am ranting on a bit here – one thing I really hate about Android is how it hides the whole concept of a file hierarchy from the user – this works great when stuff is auto-discovered but when you want to sort out backups or use a DLNA server that requires you to tell it which directory to serve up you then have to scrabble around trying to work out if you are or are not in the root file-system.

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