OpenVideoSmartShare

A small Windows tray application that shares your video folders as a DLNA server and streams videos to an LG TV (or any DLNA renderer).

Made as a replacement for LG SmartShare, which I believe is no longer maintained. I was using it as a simple way to play videos on my TV; this is even simpler 😉

Features

• Video list of the shared folders (title, duration, subtitles, size, date, folder), with search and sorting.
• Play on TV: double-click a video to play it on the default TV (set in Settings → Devices); right-click to choose any TV found on the network. Stop ends the playback while a TV is streaming a video.
• DLNA server visible from the TV's media player, with "All videos" and the folder tree.
• External subtitles: movie.srt (also .ass, .ssa, .smi, .sub, .psb, or language-tagged names such as movie.ita.srt) next to movie.mkv is sent to the TV, in the same way as SmartShare.
• Folders are rescanned automatically at startup and with Refresh: unlike the original SmartShare, there is no separate database refresh to run by hand.
• Available in 23 languages (the Windows language by default, English as fallback).

Download

Get the latest version from the Releases page. There are two options:

• Installer (OpenVideoSmartShare-Setup-<version>.exe, recommended). It installs for the current user, without admin rights, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\OpenVideoSmartShare. If the .NET runtimes are missing, it downloads them from Microsoft and installs them (this step asks for admin rights once). Run a newer installer to update.
• Portable (OpenVideoSmartShare.exe). Nothing to install: put the file in a folder of your choice and start it. To update, replace the file and keep its name. The firewall permission and the "Start with Windows" entry refer to the file's path.

The files are not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC": choose More info → Run anyway.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.

• .NET 10 Desktop Runtime and ASP.NET Core Runtime 10 (or a later version). The installer takes care of them. The portable exe opens Microsoft's download page if one is missing, one runtime at a time. To install both at once:

  winget install Microsoft.DotNet.DesktopRuntime.10 Microsoft.DotNet.AspNetCore.10

Replacing LG SmartShare

SmartShare starts through the scheduled task \SmartShare. Once you are happy with OpenVideoSmartShare, uninstall SmartShare, or disable only its autostart from an elevated prompt:

schtasks /Change /TN "SmartShare" /Disable

Network

• HTTP on TCP 52100 (the next free port if busy), SSDP on UDP 1900.
• The TV must reach the PC: the app checks Windows Firewall at startup and offers to add an inbound rule for its executable. It can be added later from Settings → DLNA Server Settings.

Privacy

OpenVideoSmartShare does not send any information to the internet. It only talks to devices on your local network: it announces its DLNA server, serves the shared videos to the TVs that ask for them, and controls the TV you choose for playback.

---

Building it yourself

Everything from here on is for those who want to build OpenVideoSmartShare from source or work on the code. To simply use the app, Download is all you need.

Build from source

You need the .NET 10 SDK; for the installer also Inno Setup 7.

dotnet test
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools\publish.ps1 -Install

publish.ps1 builds a single OpenVideoSmartShare.exe into dist\. Options:

• -Version 1.2.0 stamps a version into the exe (default: the one in the csproj).
• -Installer also builds dist\OpenVideoSmartShare-Setup-<version>.exe with tools\build-installer.ps1, which looks for ISCC.exe in the ISCC environment variable, the PATH and the default Inno Setup folders.
• -Install closes a running instance (OpenVideoSmartShare.exe --exit) and copies the exe to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\OpenVideoSmartShare, the folder the installer uses.

Translations

Language files are generated, do not edit them by hand:

python tools\l10n\build-languages.py

The sources are tools/l10n/smartshare-strings.json (the original SmartShare translations) and tools/l10n/manual.json (new strings and corrections).

Other Files

What	Where
Settings	%APPDATA%\OpenVideoSmartShare\settings.json
Log (useful to see what the TV requests)	%LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenVideoSmartShare\log.txt
Library cache	%LOCALAPPDATA%\OpenVideoSmartShare\library-cache.json
Autostart	HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\OpenVideoSmartShare

License

MIT.