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Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know a good FLOSS basic / lightweight solution for an underpowered machine to serve streaming audio and video to local LAN browser clients with no (or optional) frills such as no db, no running off to download album covers, and so on?

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For music only, I am using mpd with upnpmpdcli on a RasPi (zeroW) and control it over BubbleUPnP from my phone. No video solution unfortunately.

mpd plays music through the audio device of the system running mpd, though, right? It doesn't stream, unless there's some configuration I missed... I've been using it locally for years and it's fine at that use-case.

I recently switched from Volumio to Logitech Media Server for playing audio over a couple raspberry pis and like how simple it is. It's GPL and if you install the Material Skin add on it looks nice enough. Volumio was too complex for something that just streams audio files.

mpd is a server. You can get native client that connect to it locally but you can also get web frontends too.

https://www.musicpd.org/clients/

> MPD is designed around a client/server architecture, where the clients and server (MPD is the server) interact over a network. Thus, running MPD is only half of the equation. To use MPD, you need to install a MPD client (aka MPD interface).

Correct. I run mpd on my desktop machine, then connect to it from a client either running on my desktop (https://github.com/floren/Ampd) or on my phone or my laptop. However, regardless of where my client is executing, the music comes out of the speakers attached to my desktop. If there's a way to stream music from the server to the client, I am not aware of it.

I've definitely done it before. It used to be my primary way to stream music at work from my home server. This was likely a decade ago so I couldn't say exactly how it was set up (I've since switched to the, now seemingly abandoned, Subsonic) but knowing me SSH probably played a key part.

To stream from MPD you can configure an output plugin such as: http, shout, snapcast.

https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins.html#output-plu...

Ive been using navidrome lately for self hosted music streaming. It has a bunch of android/ios apps

Which OS? If the sending device is Linux, you can create a null pulseaudio device and set it as default. Then capture from it, compress it and stream out via rtsp using ffmpeg. On the receiving end, ffplay listens on the correct port and plays it. If you're interested I'll grab the commands I run on both sides.

Unlike the other solutions that force you to use mpd to play the music, this captures whatever is playing on the source (YouTube, Spotify, MusicBee)

Yes, it works with pipewire (unlike pulseaudio-dlna)

I'll be honest, it's not perfect but almost

Server is linux, clients would be firefox, under linux / android / windows.

I'm really interested in something that makes video and audio files browsable based on their directory structure, and then simply streamable in-browser, for multiple clients simultaneously.

I wrote a default directory index script to present mp4s as html5 video, but there's also some mkvs and avis. Transcoding on the fly might be a bit heavy for this old machine though, so maybe I should just batch up some transcoding into h264 / aac to run overnight.

miniDLNA/ReadyMedia seems to cover what you're looking for. It technically has a DB, but only to keep track of what it's serving (artist, albums, etc.). Supports m3u playlists.

I've been using it for a few years without complaints. Plays nice with VLC, and that can run just about anywhere.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Gerbera is decent, simple and lightweight.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a look.

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