VLC as DLNA Client on Linux

Since version 2.0 VLC is able to play content from a DLNA Server.

On Ubuntu it seems not to be working out of the box. The first challenge is to realize, that a probably installed firewall (eg. ufw) is blocking all incomming traffic, meaning the broadcast of the DLNA server is not seen.

Add a rule to the firewall, to enable incoming traffic on port 1900 UDP for your media-server IP.

Therefore you might want to use a graphical user interface like gufw installable either in the Software Center, or with the terminal: 

$ sudo apt-get install gufw

Afterwards VLC should be able to see your DLNA server, but when double clicking, it seems that nothing happens. But this is not true - if you look more closely, you will realize that you suddenly have a lot of wlan/lan traffic. VLC is syncing the database without any graphical feedback. This is not really user-friendly.

After some time (depended on the size of your database, so be patient...) a folder icon appears, double clicking on it takes a looong time again. This process without graphical feedback (again!) is finished when you see a triangle in front of the folder... YAY! 

Now you can browse your database and start a movie, songs and even look at images!

Have fun!