Universal Media Server | Forum

UMS is only a server, it doesn't render/display/play content. To do that, you need a UPnP AV/DLNA player. While many hardware devices supports UPnP AV/DLNA, support in software is somewhat lacking. There are options, but none that really has a complete, solid implementation that I'm aware of.

The two most obvious choices are Kodi and VLC - they can both connect to UMS. It's also possible to use UMS' web interface to play media from any browser, although format support is somewhat limited with the web interface, and I'm not sure if Safari works at all.

I don't know much about macs but have just tried this myself on my pc and laptop using firefox. just point your web browser to the machine's ip with the content you want to play and the port UMS is using. eg for me I would use 192.168.1.74:9001 to connect to the web interface.

nikkigrace wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:38 am I understand that the server is not a player, I am just looking for a way I can even view any of the files/folder names on my macbook, so far I haven't even been able to detect the server.

You say VLC and Kodi and maybe the web browser can do this, but my question is how can I access it using these methods?

I've tried VLC, they have a Universal Plug n'Play option on the sidebar, but the UMS doesnt show up there. I've tried File>open Network and can't figure it out without any instructions.

The only 'web browser' option I've been able to find is if I open up UMS on my macbook pro and click 'Web interface' which opens up the browser, but when I browse through these files they are only showing the LOCAL files on my macbook, when I am looking to view the server files from my Mac Mini.

If you intend to browse mac mini from macbook, you can safely remove UMS from macbook since UMS is just a server. To access mac mini via browser, you need to find out it's ip address. Then hit http://<ip address>:9001 . For UPnP detection, you would need a UPnP capable player as pointed out by @Nadahar.

Regarding VLC, UMS is supposed to show under UPnP in the sidebar. VLC have several issues with its implementation though, and they vary a lot with the different versions. From my experience, you need to be on a 3.x version for it to work at all. Even within VLC 3.x there are variations/bugs. I don't know them all, but I've come across one bug that makes VLC not work with UPnP at all: If your network interface name contains any non-ASCII characters. I don't know how macOS handles this, but under Windows these are localized. On English Windows versions, wireless network interfaces will be named "Wireless connection <n>", while in Norwegian for example, they will be named "Trådløs tilkobling <n>". This is enough to break UPnP support in VLC (bot "å" and "ø" are non-ASCII), and the only workaround I've found is to rename the network interface to something containing only ASCII.

I'm sure there are other similar bugs as well.