Tag Archives: Serviio

Managing Youtube playlists on Serviio

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Today I enhanced my Serviio DLNA server hosted on my Synology DS412+ diskstation to show videos of my Youtube playlists on my connected TV’s. I installed the Youtube online content plugin (Youtube.groovy, version 29.12.2012) in the NAS /volume1/public/serviio/plugins folder. I stopped and restarted the Serviio server in the NAS package center to activate the plugin.

The next step was to install the chrome extension Serviiotube in the Chrome browser which allows to add videos and playlists in the Serviio Online Resources Library from the Youtube webpage.

Serviiotube in Youtube

Serviiotube in Youtube

The resulting source page in the Serviio webconsole is shown hereafter :

Serviio Console, Online Resources

Serviio Console, Online Sources

Serviio DLNA media server

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Last update : May 8, 2013

Serviio is a free media server allowing you to stream media files (music, video or images) to DLNA renderer devices on your connected home network. Serviio is based on Java technology and therefore runs on most platforms. A pro version was launched in July 2012 when the 1.0 version was released.

The relevant features of Serviio are :

  • streams audio, video (SD & HD) and image files in their native format or transcoded in real-time
  • streams content from online sources (RSS feeds, live audio/video streams, web page content, …)
  • streams your PC desktop
  • includes a plugin system, based on the Groovy language, to support streaming from non-trivial online sources or to create playlists
  • supports different editable renderer profiles
  • supports external subtitles

Serviio uses a priority-based metadata extraction to describe your media files :

  • embedded metadata into the media files
  • locally stored metadata files (.nfo sidecar files)
  • scraped online metadata

The performance and high quality of the Serviio DLNA server has been documented by the fact that Sony UK first recommended Serviio for Sony devices and recently licensed Serviio to create their own customized Homestream server. Sony started the DLNA initiative in 2003.

Serviio is developed by the freelance Java consultant Petr Nejedly (alias ZIP). The current version 1.2.1 was released on March 22, 2013. Serviio is supported by a strong on-line community, active on the main forum and on the numerous sub-forums. There are also various third party tools available, for example a web user interface in php or AJAX, consoles (ServiiDroid, …), a database for storing information about online sources (ServiiDB).

Patters created a DSM package to install Serviio on a Synology NAS.

Here is a small list of some other DLNA servers to allow you to compare the Serviio features with other projects.