A client of mine has a digital TV broadcast center that distributes TV channels to multiple rooms. This broadcast center can also distribute up to 10 UDP multicast streams.

Right now I've set up a laptop with VLC to stream a given playlist of MP4 files to the broadcast center over ethernet. It works OK, but to add or remove a video from the playlist we have to stop broadcasting and go through the setup process again. This involves setting IP address and port number and isn't for non-technical users.

What I really want is a nice UI that people without technical knowledge can use to add and remove video's to the playlist. Do you guys know any software that does this? Preferably free and Linux-based with a web interface.



You can use plex to make simple media center that all people without technical knowledge can use and stream over the net or local network


Also, this is good to see kodi.

For multicasting or another media server you should see:

wowza - a media server for Flash, Silverlight, Apple iOS (iPhone/iPad), QuickTime, 3GPP mobile, IPTV and game console video/audio streaming.

icecast - a GPL streaming media server

helix - delivers MPEG-DASH, RTSP, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), RTMP.

Red 5 server - Apache-licensed media server for RTMP and HLS

Also, it's may be helpful:


  • Thanks for your answer but unfortunately Plex doesn't support live multicast streaming. Plex is only on-demand streaming and that's not what we're looking for. – Savjee Dec 29 '15 at 13:10
  • I improved my answer as my best. I hope it's be helpful. – Ali Tavallaie Dec 29 '15 at 13:45

You can use VLC remote control. It has different interfaces: HTTP, RC. You can find more information here https://www.videolan.org/doc/play-howto/en/ch04.html

Or you can write simple program to control VLC. Here is link to C# program: https://github.com/UnickSoft/VLCControl

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