crab-dlna is a minimal UPnP/DLNA media streamer, available both as a standlone CLI (command line interface) application and a Rust library.

It allows you to play a local video file in your TV (or any other DLNA compatible device).

• Searching available DLNA devices in the local network
• Streaming audio
• Streaming video, with subtitle support

In the GitHub Releases of this repository we provide archives of precompiled binaries of crab-dlna, available for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Installation via cargo is done by installing the crab-dlna crate:

# If required, update Rust on the stable channel
rustup update stable

cargo install crab-dlna

# Alternatively, --locked may be required due to how cargo install works
cargo install crab-dlna --locked

You can list all the CLI commands by running:

crab-dlna --help

Scan compatible devices and list the available ones:

crab-dlna list

If your device is not being listed, you might need to increase the search timeout:

crab-dlna -t 20 list

Play a video, automatically loading the subtitles if available, selecting a random device:

crab-dlna play That.Movie.mkv

Play a video, specifying the device through query (scan devices before playing):

crab-dlna play That.Movie.mkv -q "osmc"

Play a video, specifying the device through its exact location (no scan, faster):

crab-dlna play That.Movie.mkv -d "http://192.168.1.13:1082/"

Add crab-dlna and tokio to your dependencies:

[dependencies] 
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
crab-dlna = "0.2"

crab-dlna provides a function to discover a list devices in the network.

use crab_dlna::Render;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    let discover_timeout_secs = 5;
    let renders_discovered = Render::discover(discover_timeout_secs).await.unwrap();
    for render in renders_discovered {
        println!("{}", render);
    }
}

We can specify a DLNA device render trough a query string, and then play a certain video in it, automatically detecting the subtitle file.

use std::path::PathBuf;
use crab_dlna::{
    Render,
    RenderSpec,
    MediaStreamingServer,
    STREAMING_PORT_DEFAULT,
    get_local_ip,
    infer_subtitle_from_video,
    Error,
    play,
};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
    let discover_timeout_secs = 5;
    let render_spec = RenderSpec::Query(discover_timeout_secs, "Kodi".to_string());
    let render = Render::new(render_spec).await?;
    let host_ip = get_local_ip().await?;
    let host_port = STREAMING_PORT_DEFAULT;
    let video_path = PathBuf::from("/home/crab/Videos/my_video.mp4");
    let inferred_subtitle_path = infer_subtitle_from_video(&video_path);
    let media_streaming_server = MediaStreamingServer::new(
        &video_path,
        &inferred_subtitle_path,
        &host_ip,
        &host_port,
    )?;
    play(render, media_streaming_server).await
}

You can access the full documentation to see more details about the library.

Copyright (c) 2022 Gabriel Magno.

crab-dlna is made available under the terms of either the MIT License or the Apache License 2.0, at your option.

See the LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT files for license details.