Serviio

I have tried several, Sony BDP, Aquos 80" LCD TV, etc. and none are able to display artwork or sort by category (genre, actors, etc.) to display similar to how Netfilx, Amazon Prime or Hulu Plus displays menu of videos. They all display only alpha sort sequence and only the title.

Can any hardware device make this happen with Serviio? If not, what software can I use to accomplish this?

First, you have your terminology wrong. You are talking about a player, or renderer, not a server. Serviio is the server.

As to the rest, I personally haven't seen a player that retrieves hardly any metadata from Serviio (which does have it, by the way). My Panasonic TV shows thumbnails, but they are tiny and that's all there is. My Sony players show nothing but the name and file type. The closest I have seen is on a Roku player.

There are two channels (that's what Roku calls their apps) that will play media from a DLNA server. First is Chaneru. This will display a movie thumbnail, and if you press one of the remote keys (the * if I remember correctly) opens a metadata window with information. The issue here is Chaneru doesn't read the Serviio metadata, but instead retrieves its own metadata. I have found some movies incorrectly identified. There's also no metadata for TV series, only movies. There is a small one time charge for this channel. The developer has an issue with Roku, as every time he has his player working well, Roku releases new firmware and messes something up. I feel bad for him, and he has worked very hard on this. For a while I could play everything I had, but now none of my HD videos will play, regardless of format.

The other channel is the Roku Media Player. This is brand new, and still a work in progress. At this time it is free, but I don't know if they are planning a future charge. It provides a thumbnail image during the screen scrolling through the titles. When you select a movie, one more screen opens, but all it shows is a larger (slightly) thumbnail, running time, and the play movie button. I am expecting them to eventually add metadata on this page, but nothing yet. I have the same issue playing HD video here as I do with Chaneru. Online sources do play here.

Oh, and as far as sorting by genre or other category, Serviio has that ability, and it can be configured on the Presentation panel. You can display groups by Title (alphabetical sub-groups), Movies (one group with everything), Series (separate TV episodes here, not listed with the movies), Folders (each separate shared location), Last Viewed, Last Added, Genres, Ratings, Actors, Directors, Producers, Release Years, Playlists (one of my favorites) and Online (Internet streaming sources, often requiring a plug-in). Each one of these categories will be listed on your player menu lists.

it is possible to make widget for smart tv like plex has, but who has time and knowledge, and again it is only for specific brand (samsung for example).

Sent from my LG-E440 using Tapatalk 2

Anything's possible

I don't know what is entailed to create apps like this. First you have to find out what programming language the device uses, then understand the DLNA protocol. You have to have some way to test the app, which means you need some way to load the app without going through the device's normal app store. This also means you need to own such a device.

I don't know any of this myself, although I'm tempted to try learning it for Sony devices. There seems to be a market for something with a user interface similar to Netflix or Plex. How big a market, and could it justify the time and expense necessary to do all this, I can't answer.

DLNA implementation on current players is rather laughable...

The way I cope with that is by using a DLNA-control-app on my tablet or phone.

BubbleUPnP is able to retrieve folder art and display metadata aswell as tell my TV to play the content.

The implementation on how to access metadata, however, is kind of cumbersome in BubbleUPnP.

But there is hope for ServiiGo to become a DLNA-controller in the future, since the way it displays metadata is pretty much perfect in my opinion.