Universal Media Server | Forum

Hello,

First time here. I have never used UMS so forgive me if this is a naive question.

My daughter is in lockdown far away. I would like to use UMS to give her access to several videos on my PC stored in a specific directory (Windows 10 x64). Can I do that with UMS and is it just a question of sending her a URL or is that not the way things work? Trying to organise for here to be able to see a movie stored on my PC tonight, hence the scramble for answers.

By all means point me in the direction of where in an online manual I can learn how to do this. At this stage, I don't know where to start.

Thank you for your patience.

All the best.

c

Thats not really how UMS works, its only for local connections.
I guess technically you could setup a VPN between your machines (not the ones you use to hide your IP or country) then they will appear to be on the same local network to UMS and that might work. I have no idea how to set that up though so can't recommend any software or guides that will help.

Bearing in mind that using a VPN has overheads so you will get less speed, and you will both have to have fast connections anyway. It may be easier to upload the file to a cloud site like MEGA, send her the link to the file and have her download it to watch.

Thank you very much for your explanation. I think I am barking up the wrong tree. Plex does remote connections but I am probably better off trying to get her to download the file.

Thanks a lot.

If you really wanted to, you could configure your router to allow access from the Internet to UMS' web interface, and your daughter could connect to your (public) IP address at that port in her browser (9001 by default AFAICR). All you would have to do is to do a "port forward" of port 9001 to the computer running UMS in your router.

I wouldn't exactly recommended it though. While it should work, there is very limited possibilities to control access to UMS. The intended use case is on the local network, where this isn't relevant. This means that anybody on the internet that knew your IP and port and had a web-browser would be able to play the media your shared with UMS. If you only opened it for a limited time, chances are probably slim that somebody would discover and do this in time though, but nothing would prevent it.

UMS has the ability to enable "basic HTTP authentication" which is a mechanism rarely used these days, but that are built in to all browsers. You would then have to create users and put them in UMS.cred (AFAICR), and only those would be able to log in per se. But, this old form of authentication isn't exactly safe, and sends the credentials unencrypted so anyone listening on the line could pick them up. To protect against this, you would have to run UMS with HTTPS, but then you'd need to get a certificate working... and you would get all kind of warnings in the other end about the certificate unless you actually went online and bought a valid certificate from one of the providers - which I assume is way beyond the scope of this.

This isn't exactly practical, but it would be possible. The web-interface could also be accessed using VPN. I doubt that UPnP/DLNA would work over VPN without a very custom setup, since it relies on multicast which isn't usually handled by a VPN tunnel. The web-interface only use unicast though, so it will work with a "normal" connection.

Thank you very much. It is beyond me technically and does not appear safe, so I think I will stick to getting her download the video.