Installing the MiniDLNA media streaming server in Ubuntu

Linux Support
41

I thought this was the server edition ? … ie. no desktop.

42

It is, but:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

is your bestfriend. ;D

I’m all setup now. Now I can watch movies on my phone before I goto sleep, in the comfort of my bed. :slight_smile: All I need now is a Nexus 7 tablet, and I’m set.

43

You’ve chosen NOW to start quoting install commands at me :wink: :stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

44

Ja, because I figured out how to do such things. cough ;D :stuck_out_tongue:

45

By installing VLC … novel idea, I’ll give you that, and very observant that it had the same dependencies (I doubt if I’d have noticed that) … but still … :wink:

46

Rivalry? :stuck_out_tongue:

47

Hahaha … don’t suppose it really matters how you get there … :slight_smile:

and as I said … I wouldn’t have noticed that VLC had the same dependencies ???

48

Hey there,

I am currently running Ubuntu Server 11.1 and am trying to set up minidlna to act as an all-around media server for my entire house… streaming to XBMC/mobile devices/Windows PC’s, etc. etc…

I’ve followed the instructions in this thread and for the life of me I can’t seem to find the minidlna server ANYWHERE on my network… I’ve checked that the service is running, and my other services (pure-ftpd, samba, minecraft-server) all work totally fine. I’ve even tried disabling UbuntuFireWall and trying to access it, and to no avail.

this is my minidlna.conf… anything else you guys need please let me know!


# port for HTTP (descriptions, SOAP, media transfer) traffic
port=8200

# network interfaces to serve, comma delimited
network_interface=eth0

# set this to the directory you want scanned.
# * if have multiple directories, you can have multiple media_dir= lines
# * if you want to restrict a media_dir to a specific content type, you
#   can prepend the type, followed by a comma, to the directory:
#   + "A" for audio  (eg. media_dir=A,/home/jmaggard/Music)
#   + "V" for video  (eg. media_dir=V,/home/jmaggard/Videos)
#   + "P" for images (eg. media_dir=P,/home/jmaggard/Pictures)
media_dir=A,/media/Music
media_dir=V,/media/TV Shows
media_dir=V,/media/Movies

# set this if you want to customize the name that shows up on your clients
friendly_name=Sentinel DLNA

# set this if you would like to specify the directory where you want MiniDLNA to store its database and album art cache
db_dir=/var/cache/minidlna

# set this if you would like to specify the directory where you want MiniDLNA to store its log file
log_dir=/var/log

# this should be a list of file names to check for when searching for album art
# note: names should be delimited with a forward slash ("/")
album_art_names=Cover.jpg/cover.jpg/AlbumArtSmall.jpg/albumartsmall.jpg/AlbumArt.jpg/albumart.jpg/Album.jpg/album.jpg/Folder.jpg/folder.jpg/Thumb.jpg/thumb.jpg

# set this to no to disable inotify monitoring to automatically discover new files
# note: the default is yes
inotify=yes

# set this to yes to enable support for streaming .jpg and .mp3 files to a TiVo supporting HMO
enable_tivo=no

# set this to strictly adhere to DLNA standards.
# * This will allow server-side downscaling of very large JPEG images,
#   which may hurt JPEG serving performance on (at least) Sony DLNA products.
strict_dlna=no

# default presentation url is http address on port 80
#presentation_url=http://192.168.1.132:8200/
# notify interval in seconds. default is 895 seconds.
notify_interval=900

# serial and model number the daemon will report to clients
# in its XML description
serial=12345678
model_number=1

# use different container as root of the tree
# possible values:
#   + "." - use standard container (this is the default)
#   + "B" - "Browse Directory"
#   + "M" - "Music"
#   + "V" - "Video"
#   + "P" - "Pictures"
# if you specify "B" and client device is audio-only then "Music/Folders" will be used as root
#root_container=.

any and all help is greatly appreciated! :slight_smile:

49

Hello fragment137, and welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

Has the server got a static IP address ? … what is it ?

Can you send the contents of:

gedit /etc/default/minidlna

and the output from:

echo $USER

and

ls -l /var/cache
50

I’ve been having trouble getting the standard init script to work on boot.
Running Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric with the minidlna package in the standard repositories.

After modifying the /etc/init.d/minidlna script, changing the redirection of standard output from /dev/null to a logfile owned by the minidlna user:group in an attempt to get some information about what could be going wrong, the service suddenly started working :-\

Lines 92 through 98 of /etc/init.d/minidlna:

	start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE \
		--chuid $USER:$GROUP --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null \
		|| return 1
	start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE \
		--chuid $USER:$GROUP --exec $DAEMON -- \
		$DAEMON_ARGS \
		|| return 2

Unfortunately, the log file never got any data for me to use so I’m none the wiser as to what’s happening. In the end I just removed the
> /dev/null portion entirely and it still works.

That section now looks like:

	start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE \
		--chuid $USER:$GROUP --exec $DAEMON --test \
		|| return 1
	start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE \
		--chuid $USER:$GROUP --exec $DAEMON -- \
		$DAEMON_ARGS \
		|| return 2

Anybody have an idea as to why this could be?

51

Hi atomictty, and welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

I haven’t got a clue, and it doesn’t seem to make sense … but if it’s working now, you know what they say about fixing things that are not broken :wink: