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[HtpcUserAri]

Hello,
I have a number of PCs around the house with MC26 installed, all on the same network, and would like to have the option for them all to be playing back the same content at the same time -- eg whole house music.
I have seen that this should be able to be accomplished, perhaps with Zones, but am not familiar with how to set this up.
The how-to's and forum threads I have found thus far indicate either adding all devices to same zone, which had no result for me, or "linking" devices by dragging and dropping one device onto the other in the UI. This at least enabled me to control playback of another MC device, but did not allow me to have multiple devices playing same content.
Can you please point me to instructions on how to accomplish this?
Thanks,
Ari

[iphigenie]

It should work as follows:
- make sure MC is running on each machine and the target audio default is set up
- enable DLNA Renderer in the Media Network, Advanced options
- on the main machine, they will appear as zones by machine name
- link the zones to each other (I do it via right click on one but dropping works too) and the main local "Player" if you want to play there too (mine's server only)
- send to any of the linked zones and others will play too
- if all targets are MC and on the same quality of network they could be in sync, if not right click and use "adjust link timing"

BUT I have just tested it and it is not working from my MC25 - the queues are changed but the zones don't start playing. It WAS working not long ago.

It is working fine from the other 2 machines still on MC24, both can stream fine, including controlling the target that is my MC25. I havent tried MC26 yet but perhaps there is a bug in recent builds?

[JimH]

Check firewall and antivirus.  They consider MC25 different from previous versions.

[HtpcUserAri]

OK, that ended up being pretty easy.
Thanks for the clarification - it looked like I was just missing setting up DLNA on all devices. Once that was done I could play to linked devices in zones.
So, given that this is one more killer feature, why not put it up on the JRiver blog (with simple instructions for non tech-savvy)? A single JRiver license can be installed on all devices in a home and costs much much less to then perform multi-room media playback than does something like Sonos speakers.
JRiver: $80
Sonos: $150 and up for each speaker

[iphigenie]

Check firewall and antivirus.  They consider MC25 different from previous versions.

It's not the firewall on the MC25 machine but I will check from the library server's perspective as it could be that. I see the playing go to 5 seconds then vanish

[iphigenie]

OK, that ended up being pretty easy.
Thanks for the clarification - it looked like I was just missing setting up DLNA on all devices. Once that was done I could play to linked devices in zones.

Yay! Glad it worked, puzzled that somewhere along the line it stopped working for me.
As for the instructions, they are kind of lost in that page https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DLNA but perhaps there could be pages with simple typical scenarios.

[Awesome Donkey]

It could actually be related to the firewall, because MC26 is a separate install than MC25, so any firewall rules created would need to be recreated for MC26.

[HtpcUserAri]

While I can make a zone from a machine and play from there to multiple machines (this works great!), I cannot figure out how to join onto what is already playing on a remote machine.
An example to clarify: Computer A is playing Radio JRiver's fantastic Jazz mix and I want Computer B to start playing the same. What can I do from Computer B to start Computer B playing the same thing in sync? (I know that I can go onto Computer A and make a zone with both Computer A and Computer B to play to both. I'm asking how to join onto what's playing from Computer B.)
Again, I think this media zones is a killer feature of JRiver and wish it was better advertised to drum up license sales (and better documented).