Your router is serving media? What kind do you have?

Asus N113u I think? It's one of the high end Asus routers, but without AC support. Came recommended by LifeHacker. Comes with a DLNA server out of the box for attached external hard drives, and you can also easily add your own optware packages; I have a Transmission client as well for downloading torrents. Lots of other options as well.

I should check if dd-wrt does that--it might be what pushes me over to installing it on my router. If I could pick one thing on my network to serve consistently, I wouldn't have to worry about exceeding any given storage device's capacity and spread my library across them.

I swear to dog this wall doesn't have a single stud in it

If you can't find a stud, there's a more brute force option - [link] Those suckers will hold anything.

I come across enough shows on Hulu Plus that have the "oh so sad we can only stream this on a computer not a device" flag

Hmm. I should check the shows I would be watching (Arrow, SHIELD, the Flash, possibly Gotham, possibly Constantine [oh Jesus, it's all comic book shows I AM SO PREDICTABLE]) and see if they have that flag. That would be annoying.

I have a Roku streaming stick and a chromecast. I like them for different reasons. I had a Roku 2 but it wouldn't recognize the remote or the app so I don't the stick. The stick has Amazon Prime and the chromecast doesnt. You can cast from Amazon ' website but I found the audio seemed a little out of synch.

If you can't find a stud, there's a more brute force option - [link]. Those suckers will hold anything.

The description specifically says "Do not use for mounting televisions". You really need studs for heavy items like that.

Yiu can definitely install minidlna (the embedded DLNA clients used by Linux routers) on DD-WRT. I'm not sure how easy it would be to set it up to stream media from media that isn't physically connected, though. You could definitely set it up to do so by simply mounting the network drives and adding the filders, but I am not sure how well Minidlna scales to large media collections.

Have you considered dropping DLNA entirely and moving to a plex server? It seems likely to me that you might have a computer you could use for that, and then streaming from anywhere simply requires that you mount them all on the server computer and have lots of plex clients. And Plex clients are available on so much, now: even my new Vizio smart TV has a client. I have always had better luck with Plex, I just don't have an always-on PC in my house.

Full disclosure: I bought this router eventually solely because it has a lot of the power or DD-WRT without the hassles. DD was a bit of a nightmare. The Asus firmware is actually based on DD-WRT but with nicer interface and support.

Have you considered dropping DLNA entirely and moving to a plex server?

I have no idea if my three or so year old TV supports that. It's the primary client, and I haven't been able to install any server with the reliability of what comes running on my Lenovo device--even the QNAP apps on that NAS don't have the same success rate.

I'm not sure how easy it would be to set it up to stream media from media that isn't physically connected, though

Somewhat ironically, my primary media NAS is the only one not directly attached to the router. But that would a simple enough swap out, to put the one NAS I will never use for media storage on the switch instead.

I have a Linksys E3200, in readiness for installing DD-WRT, but my devices are all reliably broadcasting their server names, so the killer apps of DNS and permanent DHCP addresses never actually tipped me over into installing it.