BillG
Major Contributor
So, I decided to purchase the following as an experimental compact DLNA server for my music library for when I don't wish to power on my pc:
https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32506277592.html
It's a portable, wireless NAS/DLNA server/Powerbank/Wifi router, in case it's not clear from the above.
After a bit of screwing around with it to get it configured, the time wasted on mostly trying to understand its documentation, which is in Chinese, and dealing with its awful Android app (fortunately it has a Web interface which is much nicer, and I found an English language manual online) I loaded ~100GB of music on it for a test run: I powered it on, connected to it via Wifi from my Android phone, fired up BubbleUPnP on the phone, and lo and behold, it appears as a music library already to be streamed from.
Much to my surprise, I discovered this little devil's operating system is a version of Linux, known as OpenWrt, and its server package is known as MiniDLNA. This is great news as this means the device is open source and modifiable.
The only downside I've discovered so far is, that it needs to be connected to my WiFi router physically in order for me to access the Internet when I'm connected to it as a server from an Android device; apparently this isn't a limitation when using a Windows 10 computer, as it supposedly allows connection to multiple access points simultaneously, but I'll look into that later.
So, that was my fun project for the day, and if all continues to go well, I'll have a very portable, battery powered, wireless music server ready to travel with me when and wherever I choose to roam...
P. S. I'll post some photos in a reply shortly.
https://m.aliexpress.com/item/32506277592.html
It's a portable, wireless NAS/DLNA server/Powerbank/Wifi router, in case it's not clear from the above.
After a bit of screwing around with it to get it configured, the time wasted on mostly trying to understand its documentation, which is in Chinese, and dealing with its awful Android app (fortunately it has a Web interface which is much nicer, and I found an English language manual online) I loaded ~100GB of music on it for a test run: I powered it on, connected to it via Wifi from my Android phone, fired up BubbleUPnP on the phone, and lo and behold, it appears as a music library already to be streamed from.
Much to my surprise, I discovered this little devil's operating system is a version of Linux, known as OpenWrt, and its server package is known as MiniDLNA. This is great news as this means the device is open source and modifiable.
The only downside I've discovered so far is, that it needs to be connected to my WiFi router physically in order for me to access the Internet when I'm connected to it as a server from an Android device; apparently this isn't a limitation when using a Windows 10 computer, as it supposedly allows connection to multiple access points simultaneously, but I'll look into that later.
So, that was my fun project for the day, and if all continues to go well, I'll have a very portable, battery powered, wireless music server ready to travel with me when and wherever I choose to roam...
P. S. I'll post some photos in a reply shortly.
Last edited:
