I kind of stumbled on how great Synology Video Station is for playing and sharing your private collection of videos with all your devices, and/or other select people or the public as you designate. Starting out with just the hardware for my DS1520+ server and a private collection of videos, I just downloaded and configured the Video Station package. Video Station includes players for a wide variety of devices and the player shows you movie titles and graphics and metadata, all downloaded by your Video Station (I started with nothing but .mp4 files). In addition to computers, tablets, phones, there are players for home TV/entertainment systems too including PlayStation, Chromecast, and others. In my case I found a Video Station Channel I can install on my Roku device that powers my home TV/sound.
Now I have a great player that I can watch from the living room couch, my PC, on the go, share with other users. The player also lets you download movies for offline viewing, organize playlists, edit movie metadata, organize movies vs. TV, play different-language audio tracks or subtitles, etc. Very complete! 🙂
Showing Movie Posters/Graphics/Extended Descriptions
See in my screenshot above, the panel with John Wayne’s movie is a scrolling ad panel for movies in my collection. If you’ve ever viewed movies with a straight-up DLNA player then you know how unexciting a list of filenames look by comparison. To get all this graphics and descriptions you have to set that up in Video Station after you install it, where you can configure its access to third party services that provide that. In my case I picked the built-in support for getting the info from The Movie Database TMDB. It takes just a couple minutes to follow the video station help where you can get a API key from the movie database site and plug that into your Video Station app to enable access.
See full technical details on features, supported formats, protocols here.