I need some help here with a very confusing topic… so there’s this thing called DLNA, which is a universal standard to allow sharing of media between various home devices. Or something like that. Basically, it’s something that lets you use your wifi to play music on your speakers from your laptop, and things like that.
I have a Denon AVR-1912 stereo receiver, that supports DLNA, and it works just great with my iPhone… I can be sitting anywhere in my house and play music on my iPhone and have it come out the speakers. Neat.
I have just gotten a new Windows 8 laptop, and it clearly ALMOST works with this as well… my Denon shows up as a multimedia device or a digital media device or something like that, but I can’t figure out how to make it actually play anything. Specifically, what I really want (and this MUST be a common request) is to just route all the audio out from my laptop through my stereo. I don’t want to do something fancy involving file sharing, because all my music is already on my iPhone and that already works. But I want to be able to send the audio output from YouTube or games I’m playing on my PC through DLNA to the speakers.
Looking at the wikipedia page, and reading a discussion I found on another forum, it seems like Jamcast and Asset UPnP are both at least on the right track, but it’s not clear to me that either one works with Windows 8, and I find it baffling that there isn’t a tool that just does precisely this, since it’s such an obvious need.
Anyone got any experience or advice?
Try Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Manage Audio Devices, then click on your receiver if it’s listed, then click “Set Default” near the bottom of the window.
Dunno if that’ll work, but it’s letting me switch between laptop speakers and TV speakers, as I have both connected.
And if it is not listed there, you may be able to get it to appear by right clicking in the body of the playback tab in the Sound window, and then checking “Show disabled devices” and/or “Show disabled devices”. Once that is done you may actually be able to see the relevant device’s icon, and enable the connection. (At any rate, I know you have to do that in Windows 7 in some circumstances, and very likely it is teh still teh same in 8. For some stupid reason, devices that may be available to connect to, are sometimes hidden by default, and there is no menu item or anything like that to unhide them. You just have to know about the right clicking trick.)
Incidentally, I think Steophan probably meant right click on the icon for your stereo to set it as default (if and when you can see it). (But, again, I am going by what I had to do in Windows 7, not 8, and I am using HDMI not DLNA, so it may be different).
You can either right click and select from the menu, or left click to select the device, then left click the “Set Default” button at the bottom of the menu, in Win 8 at least. I’ve just checked it to be sure, though, and I’m also using HDMI.
Yes, that is how it is in 7 too. Either of those ways works. However, as I said, the device may be hidden altogether, in which case you (probably) need to right click in a blank area of the Playback tab of the Sound window in order to get the menu to appear that allows you to unhide it; and then you can set it as your default sound output device in the way you describe.
Unfortunately it’s more complicated than all of that, since the stereo isn’t a sound device at all, it’s a fancier and more complicated type of thing entirely… I did it get working via a program called “Jamcast”, but it turns out that all of DLNA works via streaming and buffering, so there ended up being a noticeable delay in the audio. Fine for streaming music, not great for audio that is synced to people talking in a movie, or what have you.
Is your stereo close enough to your computer that you can plug it directly in? I have audio out>headphone jack cable that does the job, and has the advantage of not requiring any setup, or having any delay.