Serviio

they say curiosity killed the cat but I wanted to see what if anything my fire TV could do , as I have a serviio pro PC server on my LAN

I can get serviio to work with fire tablets using the matching android app, but on th gen 3 Fire TV I try with VLC - it says there is a Serviio DLNA server - good - it offers the expected choices, albums, artists, videos... but everything below that is "no data" or "empty folder"
[ i vaguely recall something similar with I experimented with DLNA on my Samsung TV but I forget the fix, if there was one ]

i suspect its because amazon don't rally like DLNA on their fire TV or that VLA is badfly coded. VLC on fire tv cant get to the shared folders directly on my PC either - it sees my PC as SMB but cannot then find anything

is this a dead end or am I missing a cunning trick or two
I will see if I can push the serviigo android app to the fire tV and/or the bubble Pnp app that I own somewhere, while I wait for feedback.
as I say , I am 99% sure it's not a serviiio bug...

update- i pushed serviigo across to fire TV from Fire tablet using easy fire tolls
that had a better crack at it
it crashed once, and the app menus are very slow to respond but I was able to select and play an MP3
flac is not working but that will be because fire tv cant handle flac and I so need to give the serviio server a preset profile for that device that will make it transcribe - i gave it a ROku profile and it does transposed flac now ?
menus may speed up if it has the sense to cache some data...
so although my money was on amazon having placed a security block on DLNA that is not the case, its that VLC app is apparently not coded to do what it says on the tin.

What profile do you have selected in the Serviio console for your Fire TV? My daughter has one but I don't think she uses it to connect to here Serviio server. I think it's mainly used for Netflix and Amazon.

Most likely you are set to the generic profile, which transcodes nothing. The Fire has similar codec support to the Roku players, so you might try one of those. Roku supports FLAC, so it won't transcode those. The DirecTV profile transcodes everything, which is worth a test.

Yes I fixed the profile set it as roku, all good with servigo app, but vlc app will not play nice with servisol on fire tv

Ps. I could of course do everything in plex on the fire TV but I decided long ago not not let plex servers access my mp3 collections, as plex goes overboard with creating huge amounts of metadata files and can swamp a ssd drive with all of that

Hence the try with serviio as that is much better behaved and has all my music already indexed.

So conclusions so far, vlc for fire is useless, serviigo works but that's more more of a a video app. Mx player needs touch screen or virtual mouse.
I never much liked the bubblepnp app. I am open for suggestions for other music player apps to try on fire TV that can use serviigo dlna service

I can test push anything from my android tablets to fire TV with the easy fire tools app, to see if they work. And I have spotify, but I would like something that can access my locally stored play along and backing tracks that spotify does not have, and play them via the fire TV box

And then maybe also explore what the Nvidia shield TV box can do with Dlna....

Well, there's quite a price difference between a Fire TV and the Nvidia Shield. But the Shield does support many more codecs, so transcoding is not needed for most files.

Since I have used either personally, I can't recommend apps for either of them. If your primary focus is audio, and not video, you might try one of the lower end Roku players. As I mentioned, they do support FLAC, and the Roku Media player does a pretty good job with Serviio.

you misunderstand - I already own both of fire TV, Shield TV boxes. and I use them both with Plex for videos. SO i am not looking for hardware recommendations.
but I don't want to use plex for audio, and I do want to use owned audio that is not available in spotify ( like purchased backing tracks/ play-alongs )
so I am testing what works with Serviio for flac + Mp3
also, as a fallback , having serviio for video working on fire tv will be good because if my internet ever goes down, plex sulks and will not work over LAN [ that is a known issue at plex, or a " featrure" . there are some alleged workarounds ]

strangely i tried the Archos video player on fire tv, that was useless as its video only, and it sees folders but then says empty directory-
so then I went back to trying vlc for fire again and it is now working. vlc is no longer saying empty folder but is displaying and playing music tracks. The only change since yesterday was assigning the roku profile to it. so either that made it work properly, or just leaving it overnight has allowed it to look and index the available serviio folders all by itself - seems unlikely

anyway I think I will stop while I am winnign there. Fire TV: audio - two working solutions vlc for fire app talking to my serviio pro server, or sideloaded serviigo android client app talking to same server - that has a niver interface and is probably the better of the two, but for anyone following this you have to sideload it to fire tv and it only works with a serviio paid-for pro server

for the shield TV - one option is to upload my music to Google for free, and then use the onboard google music app, but i don't much care for that. syncing is a pain to make work for new tracks, and browsing through a music collection is very basic. I should be able to install the servvgo android app to shield & use that with serviio server though

Yep, I didn't understand you already had a Shield.

From what I've read on a Shield forum, Kodi/SPMC are good players that should work with Serviio. SPMC is a Shield specific version of Kodi, that apparently works better than the straight Kodi install. But I would expect you wouldn't have any issues playing almost anything on your Serviio server using your a Shield. It supports almost all codecs.

Yes, changing to the Roku profile is probably what did the trick. If Serviio doesn't believe your media is playable, you won't see anything. Changing the profile now made the media appear as playable.

ok i had a quuck dabble in kodi, I could not see how to aim the file/folder selector at my LAN server
i tired the simple meyhod of inputting internal ip address 192.168.0.13 that did not work and it is tedious to try variations via remote control on screen keyboard
can you tell me please, or link me to a how to tell the kodi client about my serviio server. please assume I am a complete noob with Kodi, I have played with installing builds & add ons but I do that by blindly following others instructions.. basic stuff like creating a local or a lan media library for kodi sill baffles me.

what i want to do, for curiosity/education as much as for actual use, is try out all the options for getting music served from serviio onto both devices ( fire TV & Shield TV) and make how to do it notes for future reference )
so work through the on board apps, and the ones designed for those devices, plus any other candidates that I can sideload & test.

e.g. discovered last night that I own the paid for version of mezzmo client app for amazon devices , which should do dlna. I had tried the matching mezzmo server before, had issues with it, abandonded it in favour of plex & serviio
i also have a no-ads licence for serviigo, i think that has sideloaded ok, but the ads in that app are non obtrusive anyway- they are only on some menus. serviigo works on both devices and works well with serviio as that is what it is designed to do

Sorry, I've only dabbled with Kodi once quite some time ago. I did remember that it wasn't super easy to configure for DLNA, but wasn't really hard either. But how to use the current version I have no idea. I believe that Serviio should appear as a selectable server when you are in the correct config screen, but no idea where it is.

i poked around a bit more and got kodi client to link to serviio server , without having to type in IP addresses. The Kodi UI changed hugely between v1.6 and v1.7 and maybe will change again when 1.8 becomes a stable publie release.

so i have a selection of working dlna clients on fire TV now

I should probably next check how they compare for FF/REW, speed up/slow down / skipping around within a music track, & for looping selections
plex still wins out for me for shows & movies because you can leave off and resume across all your plex client devices - that's not relevent for music playback though.

Yeah, for files that must be transcoded, Plex seems to be the only way to get all of the trick play features (FF, rewind, resume). Trick play works fine with Serviio as long as the movies don't require transcoding.

Plex provides a nice user interface, but you have very little ability to modify the way it handles files. It often transcodes files that don't require it, and even forcing Direct Play doesn't always make it happen. The way we use Serviio in my house, the trick play features aren't vital, so we stick with Serviio. Occasionally with my Roku players I encounter a file that just doesn't like to play via Serviio, so I do keep Plex running for those. But that's few and seldom played.