Help Unable to get DLNA File Sharing to work with JB update

[Roymus]

The latest JB update seems to have borked DLNA File Sharing on my phone, and a check on XDA seems to indicate a lot of people share my pain. Basically, what's happened is that I can no longer turn on File Sharing (Settings, More Settings, Nearby Devices)...the screen is completely disabled (grayed out...File Sharing and all other options disabled). This means I can't stream photos and video to my TV...not a big deal, but it is one of the cooler phone features and I'd like it back. A number of users on XDA have submitted workarounds including:

1. Tapping the disabled checkbox 10-20 times until it comes back on (according to this user, the problem is that the phone is enumerating through all the video, music and other files on the phone and it takes a long time...this smacks of BS and doesn't work for me in any case)

2. Going into Application Manager, selecting the All Tab, then scrolling down to Nearby Devices and clearing cache. This sounded promising to me, until I tried it and discovered that there is no Nearby Devices entry (or anything similar) in my apps list.

3. Unmounting the SD card and trying again (this is related to the story in #1, which supposedly "frees" the phone from enumerating through all the files). Didn't work.

4. Toggling WiFi on and off (also changing the sleep policy) to somehow "push" the DLNA into working. No joy.

My thought is that this is an old-fashioned garden-variety bug that needs to be corrected by an update. Until then, if anyone has a workaround they've discovered, I'm all ears.

 

[markyboy81]

Do yourself a favour and download MediaServer from the play store. I had no end of problems with the stock app, whereas MediaServer works much better.

 

[Roymus]

I'm familiar with this but it's not as seamless as the pre-JB DLNA sharing. With that, all I needed to do was press the icon above a picture or video and it would stream to my Samsung TV, every time, flawlessly. And in any case, what I described is still a bug in the update and should be fixed. Note: I'm running a custom ROM, but I've gotten confirmation from various users on XDA that the stock update also has the bug.

 

[loomer]

I just wanted to mention I figured this out. I was trying to get the videos to play to my TV through the Video player app. If you play the videos through the Galary app, for some reason that little TV icon shows up at the top of whatever video you are playing. After you do that a few times, it then asks if you want to allow you TV to be a shared device, and then everything starts working the way it did ebfore jellybean! Whew! Feel much better that this is working now!