Home Theater - Digital Content Streaming Using DLNA

Some time ago we bought a SONY® Blu-Ray® player

Among its many features it has the capability of playing DLNA® media content from any DLNA® server

Being a techo, I've been meaning to bypass the need to have various home-made videos and camera photos copied to USB every time we wanted to display them on the Home Theater's big screen so I eventually thought I'd quickly set up a DLNA® server on my home XP® system, which has for many years doubled as the "server" for our household.
I read up on DLNA® and figured I'd just enable Windows Media Player® to act as my DLNA® media server ... because it looked like the simplest and most straight forward option.

WRONG!

I won't bore with everything I tried, but suffice to say I wasted far too much time trying everything short of doing on-the-wire protocol analysis to see what was wrong.
Under XP® SP3 with Nortons Internet Security Suite™, I could NOT make the SONY® "see" the Media Server.

So I tried VLC®.
I had more success here, as I could get other devices in the house to "see" the http stream from the serving VLC®, but again, the SONY® wouldn't have a bar of it!


Eventually I decided to give the freeware version of Serviio® a go.
All I can say is that I wish I'd gone that route at the start!
Twenty minutes to download, instal, configure media sources and test and the SONY® immediately saw the server and all the published video and image streams and "just worked"