Video Playback from Streaming Server

[tenly]

It's hard to believe I can't find a simple, free app to do this.

I've got a Terabyte NAS device with a built in DLNA compliant UPNP Media Server. (Promise SmartStor 4300N)
I've got a network media player hooked up to my home theater system. (IOData Linkplayer2)

I power on the Linkplayer2, it connects to the network and within seconds, the NAS device shows up on the main menu. I select it, I get a menu from which I can select "Pictures, Music, Video". I select Video and I've got the hierarchical structure in which I stored all my videos. I browse to the video I want to watch, I click okay, and I can watch the video.

The problem is, sometimes I don't want to power up the home theater to watch a short video. I want to watch it from one of my 5 other computers, but I can't seem to find simple playback software I can install on Windows XP which acts like my digital media player (automatically finds and connects to a media server and presents menus for selecting a video). The only way I can make this work is to map a drive to the NAS server, copy the file locally and then watch it with Media Player.

I can't imagine that such software doesn't exist, but for the life of me, I can't find it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance...

[jagabo]

Every media player I have can access files on any share on the LAN.

[tenly]

Thanks for your reply, but my goal is to do this without having to authenticate and/or map a drive to a network share.

I have a Media Server running on my LAN and I want a piece of software (or media player) that can discover the Media Server automatically and provide a menu driven interface at least vaguely similar to the interface built in to the standalone hardware based network media players.

If that is what you meant, then please tell me which Media Player software you are using that can do this...

[guns1inger]

Elisa claims to support network storage and UPnP storage. Might be worth a look.