Got one for the GRM Hive Mind.
A few months back, we decided to convert a room in the house to a home office for me, since I've been working from home since March and will be even after the pandemic is over. Also, it's basically heaven for me, with most of my PC stuff, retrogames, and stringed instruments in one location. It's also home to my vinyl collection.
A month back, I decided to make a small change. We had an extra Fire tablet kicking around. I decided to do this with it:
It's wall mounted now with power, and it brings my "totally GRM" HiFi setup into the 21st Century. While it's cool, it could be better.
One thing I'd like to do is be able to stream my digital music collection over my WiFi network from a PC to the tablet. Is this something that can be done easily? I feel like I've done this before with other devices, but I have no idea how to get a Fire Tablet and Windows 10 to talk to each other.
What say you GRM Hive? Can it be done?
Look up how to get the play store on your fire tablet. Install plex on your computer, and add plexamp to the tablet.
In reply to lnlogauge :
I've already installed the Play store on there. I'll check this out. Thanks!
Apparently, there are a lot of apps that do this. Plex is cool, but access via Android requires an app purchase, so I'm going to try a few others and see if I can get something working before I pay for that.
Following because I dig this setup.
Trying out Jellyfin right now. It's similar to the others and opensource (and free). So far, it's working.
I also tried Kodi, but like the last time I tried it, I found the interface and setup super clunky. Also, it only runs in landscape mode on Android, which doesn't work for me.
I find myself wondering if there's an even simpler setup; is there any sort of media server/UPnP server/DLNA server built into windows? How about your router?
We have an ASUS AC1300 router*, and by dint of having a USB drive connected to it, it is our media server, used by both Sonos and our "smart" TV. Wonder whether your router has a media server mode, and whether it can serve a share off of your PC... Then just about any audio app should be able to play from that server, I suspect.
* This particular model may or may not be beyond being current with Windows 10, which as of an update at some point won't talk to a SMB1 share without tweaking. If you were buying a new router today, I suspect this wouldn't be an issue, and I'm hoping a firmware update on my router solves it, but I didn't want to give a model number without the caveat... It still works for serving media, I just can't access the share from my PC!
There are many ways to do this, if you think you might expand into streaming more than music in the future (like videos or accessing other files), I'd recommend the Samba server route. VLC for Android can play files from there.
So far, the Jellyfin setup is working well enough. I set up the server app on my PC and have been testing it on my tablet and cell phone. I can access everything that I allow it to access on the desktop. This is mainly for music playback and not video, but it does do all sorts of different media files. Sound quality is decent; not quite as good as having it at the source or on physical media, but that was to be expected. It's no worse than streaming over a streaming service.
As far as hooking something up directly to a router, that's not ideal for my setup. My wireless router is in my basement and the PC is elsewhere in my office. I suppose I could load some stuff onto a HDD and connect it that way, but then I couldn't easily stream to devices when I'm not home, which this app allows.
