Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a set of networking protocols on the Internet Protocol (IP) that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices, to seamlessly discover each other's presence on the network and establish functional network services. UPnP is intended primarily for residential networks without enterprise-class devices.
WinDVD is a commercial DVD video player software for Microsoft Windows.
Kodi is a free and open-source media player and technology convergence software application developed by the Kodi Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium. Kodi is available for multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, with a software 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It allows users to play and view most streaming media, such as videos, music, podcasts, and videos from the Internet, as well as all common digital media files from local and network storage media, or TV gateway viewer.
MythTV is a free and open-source home entertainment application with a simplified "10-foot user interface" design for the living room TV. It turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or home theater personal computer. It can be considered a free and open-source alternative to TiVo or Windows Media Center. It runs on various operating systems, primarily Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD.
A home theater PC (HTPC) or media center computer is a convergent device that combines some or all the capabilities of a personal computer with a software application that focuses on video, photo, audio playback, and sometimes video recording functionality. Since the mid-2000s, other types of consumer electronics, including game consoles and dedicated media devices, have crossed over to manage video and music content. The term "media center" also refers to specialized application software designed to run on standard personal computers.
DigitalLiving Network Alliance (DLNA) is a set of interoperability standards for sharing home digital media among multimedia devices. It allows users to share or stream stored media files to various certified devices on the same network like PCs, smartphones, TV sets, game consoles, stereo systems, and NASs. DLNA incorporates several existing public standards, including Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) for media management and device discovery and control, wired and wireless networking standards, and widely used digital media formats. Many routers and network attached storage (NAS) devices have built-in DLNA support, as well as software applications like Windows Media Player.
Streamium was a line of IP-enabled entertainment products by Dutch electronics multi-national Philips Consumer Electronics. Streamium products use Wi-Fi to stream multimedia content from desktop computers or Internet-based services to home entertainment devices. A Streamium device plugged into the local home network will be able to see multimedia files that are in different UPnP-enabled computers, PDAs and other networking devices that run UPnP AV MediaServer software.
MediaMonkey is a digital media player and media library application developed by Ventis Media Inc., for organizing and playing audio on Microsoft Windows and Android operating systems. MediaMonkey for Windows includes various management tools, and is extensible using plugins, while MediaMonkey for Android is an adjunct for sharing the library with Android devices. MediaMonkey is commonly displayed/marketed as a solution for managing large libraries of music.
Lyrion Music Server is a streaming audio server supported by the LMS community and formerly supported by Logitech, developed in particular to support their Squeezebox range of digital audio receivers.
Windows Media Connect (WMC) is a UPnP AV server from Microsoft for Windows XP and later Windows operating systems, to share and stream media on a Windows computer to WMC clients. The first two releases of WMC were made available as stand-alone software, and included a client as well. Following that, it was renamed to Home Media Ecosystem (HME) and the media server component was integrated into Windows Media Player and Windows Home Server. WMC version 2.0 can be manually installed on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 32bit or 64bit operating system but this type of installation is not officially supported by Microsoft and requires manual tweaking of NT Services' dependencies in order to run.
A media server is a computer appliance or an application software that stores digital media and makes it available over a network.
A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users.
Orb was a freeware streaming software that enabled users to remotely access all their personal digital media files including pictures, music, videos and television. It could be used from any Internet-enabled device, including laptops, pocket PC, smartphones, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii video game consoles.
The following table compares the operating system support and basic features of various UPnP AV media servers.
TwonkyMedia server (TMS) is DLNA-compliant UPnP AV server software originally offered by TwonkyVision GmbH. TMS runs on Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android and QNX operating systems. TwonkyMedia server can be used to share and stream media to most UPnP AV or DLNA-compliant clients, in addition to non-UPnP devices through the HTML, RSS, and JSON supported front ends. After the PacketVideo acquisition of Berlin-based TwonkyVision GmbH by 17 October 2006, Twonky was renamed PVConnect in November 2007, but the name was changed back to TwonkyMedia server by 7 January 2010. Corporate parent NTT DOCOMO sold PacketVideo NorthAmerica and Europe to Lynx Technology on 10 May 2015 and PacketVideo Japan exactly one year later on 10 May 2016 transferring the Twonky product line to Lynx, renaming TwonkyMedia Server to Twonky Server.
μTorrent, or uTorrent, is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client owned and developed by Rainberry, Inc. The "μ" in its name comes from the SI prefix "micro-", referring to the program's small memory footprint: the program was designed to use minimal computer resources while offering functionality comparable to larger BitTorrent clients such as Vuze or BitComet. μTorrent became controversial in 2015 when many users unknowingly accepted a default option during installation which also installed a cryptocurrency miner.
Serviio is a freeware media server designed to let users stream music, video or image files to DLNA compliant televisions, Blu-ray players, game consoles and Android or Windows Mobile devices on a home network.
Universal Media Server is a DLNA-compliant UPnP media server. It originated as a fork of PS3 Media Server. It allows streaming of media files to a wide range of devices including video game consoles, smart TVs, smartphones, and Blu-ray players. It streams and transcodes multimedia files over a network connection to the rendering device, ensuring that a supported rendering device will receive the content in a format supported by the device. Transcoding is accomplished through packages from AviSynth, FFMpeg, MEncoder, and VLC.
NearlyFreeSpeech is a privately funded, US-based, low cost web hosting provider and domain name registrar that began in 2002. It was started in response to concerns about the entry of large companies into Internet publishing, and to promote freedom of speech.
