Digital Living Network Alliance (DNLA for short) is a group of companies whose intent is to standardize protocols for home media servers.

DLNA is an open protocol, and there are many implementations of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DLNA&useskin=vector

Basically, you take a computer with media (those TV shows & movies you've backed up from DVDs you own, right?) on it. You'd then start your DLNA server on that machine, where the server is configured to see your media.

At that point, you can go into the living room (with the DLNA-aware widescreen TV) or out on the back patio (with your DLNA-aware tablet) and watch whatever media is in the collection on those devices. You may also read "DLNA-aware" as "Universal Plug and Play" (UPnP)

There are many implementations of DLNA software (it's found in all the well known media serving software (like Kodi).

I prefer this implementation, as it's stupid simple, and very, very lightweight (it's not a bloated cumbersome everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blumberboat like Kodi).

https://nmaier.github.io/simpleDLNA/

SimpleDLNA requires the Microshaft .Net framework (instructions on download page, if necessary) and *BONUS* it runs on linux with the Mono library.

I have this running on several local machines and it works a treat. It doesn't eat up memory over a long usage period or have any other obnoxious behavior, even on windoze.