Your home media on Couchwave

Couchwave plays the movies, shows and home videos you already have: on a media server like Plex, on a Synology or other network drive, or on a USB drive plugged into the TV box. They show up in My List, in rows next to your recordings, and pick up where you left off.

There are two ways in. Most people only need the first.

• A media server (DLNA). Plex, Jellyfin, Emby or Synology's Media Server. Couchwave finds it by itself, with posters and titles. Nothing to type.
• A network drive (SMB). A plain shared folder on a NAS or computer. You add it once with its address and login, and Couchwave shows the folders and files.

Media servers (DLNA): found by themselves

DLNA is a standard way for a media server to share its library with TVs on the same home network. Turn it on once in your server, and every TV box with Couchwave sees it under My List. Plex libraries come in tidy: movies in a poster row, TV shows by season.

Plex

1. Open Plex in a web browser and sign in to your server.
2. Go to Settings, then under your server choose DLNA.
3. Turn on Enable the DLNA server and save.

That's it. Your Plex libraries appear in Couchwave within a minute. Plex on a Synology works the same way.

Synology, without Plex

1. In DSM, open Package Center and install the free Media Server package.
2. Put your videos in the video shared folder (or add your folders in Media Server's settings under indexed folders).

Jellyfin and Emby

Jellyfin: in the Dashboard, open Plugins → Catalog, install the DLNA plugin and restart the server. Emby: turn DLNA on in its server settings.

Not showing up?

• Same network. The TV box and the server must be on the same home network. A guest Wi-Fi, or a separate network for TVs or smart devices, keeps them apart.
• Give it a minute. Couchwave looks for servers when it starts. Open My List again after the server has finished starting.
• Some mesh and business routers stop devices from finding each other. Look for a setting called multicast, IGMP snooping or device discovery, or plug the TV box in with a network cable.
• Buffering on big 4K files? A media server sends the original file. A network cable to the TV box, or a 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection, helps a lot.

Network drives (SMB): a shared folder

No media server? Couchwave can open a shared folder directly, on a Synology, another NAS or a computer. You'll need the server's name or address (like nas.local or 192.168.1.20), the shared folder's name, and a username and password if the folder has one.

Add it on the TV in Couchwave under Settings → Network drives. Soon you'll also be able to add it here at couchwave.tv, under Your account → Network drives, and send it to all your TVs at once, with no typing on the remote.

Tip: a read-only login just for the TV

Make a separate user on your NAS for your TVs, with read-only access to your video folders. The TV can then watch everything but can never change or delete a file. If a TV box is ever lost, change that user's password and nothing else is affected.

On a Synology: Control Panel → User & Group → Create, give the user Read only on your video folder and no access to the rest. Make sure SMB is on under Control Panel → File Services.

USB drives

Plug a USB drive into the TV box and it appears in My List by itself.

Antenna TV

Have a networked antenna tuner? Most come with their own app. If yours also shares its channels over DLNA, Couchwave finds it like any other media server.

Still stuck?

Send us a note from the contact form and tell us which server or drive you have.