Universal Media Server | Forum

Hi all

Really basic question here so apologies in advance

I have installed UMS, pointed it to a test movies folder that contains 3x MP4 (H264/mp3) files for test purposes. Added 2 forwarders for port 9001 and 54321 (I changed the default from 5001)

Connecting locally from the Win10 PC that's serving, happy days. However, I then tried to connect from an Android device just using Chrome and the internet facing FQDN - which loads the page, I can select DLNA, it shows my 3 test files with thumbs, but when I click on a movie the log shows movie starting, then a few seconds later, movie stopping. No video in my Android device

Next, I tried via wifi, and connecting to the internal IP. Same thing.

I restarted the server - without then testing on my PC, and it worked - once. Trying a second connection and no video appears

For reference, I have MX Player with the correct codec installed on each of my Android devices

Am I missing something obvious? UMS 5.3.0 downloaded today

My plan would be for a single internet user occasionally connecting to one of my films

The DLNA standard which UMS is based on, only works on the local IP subnet. It's based on broadcast/multicast and whoever designed the standard decided that it shouldn't be used "in more complex scenarios" where DNS, multiple subnets or routers are involved.

What you're trying to do is therefore impossible with UMS or any other DLNA based media server.

Okay thanks Nadahar

Looks like I'll need to switch to a VOD server using VLC. Strange how it does work tho - once. Using my android phone on 4G only did work - but as stated, only once

It's a mix of local subnet UDP multicast traffic and TCP HTTP traffic. The HTTP traffic will work like "normal" network traffic being able to traverse subnets, routers and port forwarding while the multicast traffic won't. The content delivery itself goes over HTTP, but discovery is based on multicast. There's probably some confusion because UMS can't "see" your client.

You could probably get it to work by setting up a RAS/VPN server on the local subnet that would assign a local subnet IP to the external connections. I haven't tried though, and there could be a lot of tinkering needed to get such a solution working.