Streaming

UPnP is a standard allowing all kind of devices to communicate with each other in side your LAN. As far as I know, it is not possible to do UPnP over the internet except building a VPN connection allowing you to do a remote login.

 

If you enable media sharing in WMP, you can play the content on all devices in your network supporting the UPnP protocol.

 

The library pane in WMP will show all available devices.

In my case another PC running Vista and my NAS, a Qnap 109 running TwonkyVision

Win – Win

Both PCs run Vista.

It take some time before the library is complete, probably 20 minutes but then there is a one to one correspondence between de content on both machines.

For samplers I use Various Artist as the Album Artist and the Contributing Artists for the name of the performer.

I saw a triple entry of a sampler.

Corrected it on the server, using refresh on the client and after a moment the corrected content is displayed.

Vista - TwonkyVision

My NAS comes standard with the TwonkyVision Mediaserver, in this case running version 4.4.6

In the communication between WMP and Twonky obvious the contributing artist is uses as the artist. All the samplers are split. You get as much albums as there are tracks with different artist.

You can configure the music tree of Twonky but Vista ignores this.

I have 3378 contributing artist in my collection. Using Vista – Twonky only 775 are displayed in WMP. Likewise for songs and albums, can't get the entire collection to be displayed in WMP. 

 

Asset UPnP

Asset is a freeware UPnP server, build by Illustrate, the maker of dbPoweramp

 

The browse tree is configurable

 

Transcoding (on the fly conversion) audio formats aloows you to play formats not supported by the client.
More details can be found in the manual.

Twonky Media

A paid UPnP server.

This is version 4 as running on my NAS.

It also has a browser interface: http://IPNas:9000/

 

Version 5 has become a complete media player TwonkyMedia manager for Windows® $39.95 or € 29.95