Vie is a handy and powerful media controller app. It is based on on DLNA and UPnP technologies. The app is the perfect for anyone who has done fair amount of digital media hoarding and has amassed some large quantities of music, movies and photos on various storage devices on their local network in their house.

Vie is a dollar app that allows you to pick media stored on computers and storage devices in your house or stored on the Internet, and play it to DLNA capable TVs, audio receivers and picture frames. It is:

  • The perfect tool for the media enthusiasts that store content on devices in their home.
  • A handy media controller that can pick content from anywhere and play it on media devices on the local network.

Vie is optimized to enhance the media enthusiasts’ experience. It has advanced logic to match media content format with device capabilities to increase the chances of successful playback.

Vie – You may think you won’t need it, but it’s so cool!

How it works?

In today’s services based world everyone pushes users to consume premium content from the internet for a small fee. However, large amount of users have collected some music and movies, but mostly personal videos and photos on their computers. Accessing these personal photos and videos once downloaded on the computer becomes problematic. They are stored in many folders that could be on many different storage drives or devices.

Interoperability Standards

Isn’t it going to be nice to have quick access to the content and being able to push it to the biggest screen in the room when we need to share with friends in social environment? Yes it will be, but there are so many technologies that can be used for that and each manufacturer is pushing their tech without regards of interoperability.

The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has a goal to solve the media devices interoperability and standardizes the connectivity protocol for media exchange. It is based on Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology and has been around for a while to mature. Today there are billions of audio and video connected devices that support the standard and are certified and compliant with DLNA interoperability guidelines.

Device Discovery

Vie uses standard discovery protocol to find the media devices in your house. Once device is found Vie can figure out if there is digital media content stored on the device or if the device is a playback device.

Media Consumption

If media storage device is discovered view puts it in the list of media servers for future reference. DLNA media servers allow users to access their media in two ways: browsing and searching.

  • Browsing is a step by step approach of discovery where user picks a content folder, called container in DLNA world, reads portion of the content then pulls down another content portion. Based on the speed of the device and network this could be a very slow and frustrating process.
  • Search is much faster way to discover content. User types a search phrase and sends it to the media server. Media server pulls a list of content items that match the search criteria and returns it to the client app. Sounds wonderful, but not very many media servers implement search. The ones that do, may have just partial implementation.

Search

Vie is design goal is to cache the content of the media servers in a local database. This way the search is always uniform across all servers no matter what the server search functionality is. Vie also makes sure that content is properly synchronized with the media server, so the user always gets great experience.

Playback

If media playback device is discovered, Vie will query the device to find out the device capabilities. In all cases Vie determines the functional capabilities of the device and the supported media formats from the device. Then the device is stored in a list for future reference.

Convenience

Vie stores devices per network. It is nice convenience for a user that travels and connects to multiple different networks. After all it is nice to reduce clutter and see the devices that are on the local network.

How to use the Vie?

Using Vie is very simple. Just connect your mobile device to the local wireless network, then start the app. The app will discover all media devices that have been connected and enabled. For media servers “enabled” means that DLNA media sharing has been turned “ON”. For media playback devices “enabled” means that remote control has been turned “ON”. If device is not discovered, Google the device manual and find out how to turn on DLNA discovery and sharing.

That is all! If the device is properly set Vie can find it and control it.

New in Vie v1.0

The initial Vie public release offers the features:

  • Discover and play – find DLNA/UPnP media devices that share music, videos and pictures and play on your mobile device.
  • Play to – push and play shared music, videos and pictures to DLNA/UPnP capable media playback devices.
  • Remote control – remotely manipulate functions like audio volume, play, pause, stop, next, previous, repeat and shuffle on the connected media playback device.

Future versions of Vie are in the works that provide access to Internet and content caching capabilities and many other neat features. Stay tuned, we will keep posting lots of updates on this app since it is our passion.

Vie will be available on the Microsoft Windows Store in the next several weeks.

Vie – The media control app!