Universal Media Server | Forum

Hi there all. I've been using UMS on my local network, in concert with BubbleUPnP, to stream from a video library I've accumulated over the years. That said, I was under the impression that UMS operated as a media server, and not just some sort of streaming service. Maybe I'm confusing the concept, but I was expecting to be able to browse between various filetypes and download them, as I might with a DropBox account. Despite all efforts though, I've been unable to get this feature working with a number of .epub files I've had in my shared folders. When browsing, the folders appear to be empty. Is this an issue of Bubble? Or maybe one of UMS? Actually, if someone can confirm or deny my assumption of unhampered filebrowsing, I'd be rather grateful. Thanks again.

UMS means Universal Media Server.
Media means multimedia like Audio, Video, Pictures.
So in your case EPUB books are filtered out as unsupported by Media Server.
Not sure if adding EPUB extension to "streaming extension = " will override this filtering but you can test it.

Any extension to be picked up by UMS must be supported by a format definition in UMS. Furthermore, it must be parsable so UMS can gather information about the format to be able to compare it with the renderer's (BubbleUPnP in this case) capabilities and decide if it should stream or transcode it.

I don't know the EPUB format, but it's not defined as a known format by UMS. While I agree that electronic books should be considered "media", the concept is still somewhat new and I haven't heard of it in DLNA contexts. EPUB is not parsable by mediainfo or ffmpeg, so UMS wouldn't be able to gather any information about it and would have to handle it in a "dumb" way and simply stream it. But then again, I doubt BubbleUPnP or any other DLNA renderer would understand it. Not even PDF or ODF is supported in DLNA context.

The problem really comes from the DLNA standard. The standard is based on the uPnP AV standard, and mostly is just limits the capabilities of the UPnP AV standard. DLNA is owned by commercial electronics companies, and frankly all they care about is supporting their specific devices. The standard has many severe shortcomings, but it's the only standard supported by most hardware devices and thus it's what's being used. UPnP has the capabilities to serve any kind of content/files as far as I know.

The name "Universal Media Server" comes from the DLNA/UPnP AV term "media server" which is a defined part of the standards (that is, it's defined what capabilities such a media server should have). Universal indicates that Universal Media Server tries to cater to any DLNA capable device as opposed to its predecessor "PS3 Media Server" what was originally built just to server the Sony Playstation 3. The name must be understood in this context.

From what I can see EPUB files are supported by Android devices and it's probably easier to just transfer the files to the unit then to try to "serve" them as streaming media. I'm guessing that the files are relatively small, and that you can store a lot of them in a single device. You could set up a file share or a web server on a local computer for easy access to these from the devices.