[TUTO] Install and SetUp minidlna media server

[mcquiff]

Finally I have this working!
But how can also share the drive so I can access it from windows or mac to update the files?

[sim_tcr]

is there any way to make subtitles (srt) work with minidlna?

[jnihil]

A good write-up indeed. Working very nicely on my Pi with Rasbian.

BTW, UPnPlay is a nice dlna client for the Android. I use it for playing my audio collection off the Pi. I wish there was a free and decent dlna client player for IOS. Most I've tried are all cripple-ware.

[msuth]

Just wanted to say a massive thanks for this awesome write up!

I'm using Buzz Player on iOS to access the music/photos!

Delighted! Thanks again!

msuth

[msuth]

Just a quickie guys, can anyone reccomend a cheap receiver that I would be able to stream to? I'm thinking of setting up a folder with all my Disney movies etc. in it and giving them the ability to watch their movies etc in bed.

I don't want to shell out for a couple of extra PS3s!

[IXL]

Thanks for this, its what I have been looking for.

However...

I dont have an external harddrive, I just want to use the SD card, as I have a 16 Gig which has plenty of space...

How do I still get this running ?

[gadgethome]

You can just point it to the path on your sd card. It should still work in the same way.

[mattadamsnet]

A good write-up indeed. Working very nicely on my Pi with Rasbian.

BTW, UPnPlay is a nice dlna client for the Android. I use it for playing my audio collection off the Pi. I wish there was a free and decent dlna client player for IOS. Most I've tried are all cripple-ware.

For IOS I installed airvideo server on my pi, and use the airvideo app. the free app limits the number of returned videos, the pay version isn't much and if you are jailbroke you can still find the app online.

[mattadamsnet]

Just a quickie guys, can anyone reccomend a cheap receiver that I would be able to stream to? I'm thinking of setting up a folder with all my Disney movies etc. in it and giving them the ability to watch their movies etc in bed.

I don't want to shell out for a couple of extra PS3s!

another Pi $35
RaspMC $free

[Jevali]

Cool guide. For some reason the start on boot doesn't seem to work tho... Starting manually works no prob... I see some people saying to use a script but that seems a bit drastic when there is this update-rc.d option.
Did you tweak the pi/minidlna usergroups?

[Nukles]

Hi all,

I am facing an issue here... I put a folder to share. It's on an external drive, NTFS. When I do:
sudo service minidlna force-reload

I get no issues, directory exists and no denied permission, however... there are no files when I search with a DLNA client! Why can that be? Is it because of the NTFS file system?

[Nukles]

I figured it out how to make Minidlna work - but only to specific files... I created some folders on the SDCard and downloaded some sample files from the internet - they work perfectly.

Then I tried to copy some files from the attached USB into that directory and guess what - they are not seen by Minidlna!

Is it because they are coming from an NTFS drive? How can I change that?

[ciwol]

Not sure if anyone encountered this issue before, but the minidlna service runs with the user minidlna who would not have permission to create the dir in /home/pi (db_dir=/home/pi/.minidlna).
I have to manually create it and grant permissions -
mkdir /home/pi/.minidlna
chmod 777 /home/pi/.minidlna

Else it wouldn't scan my specified media folders.

Cheers!

Yep, I ran into the same issue and had the the same solution. I'm not a fan of 777ing files but as long as it works, I'll do that until someone gives me a better solution.

Just change the folder's owner:

Code: Select all

chown minidlna: /home/pi/.minidlna

By the way it's a great tutorial, I can play my music from the PS3 now. I'm looking for a way to improve the audio quality, it sounds like a bit saturated right now.
Thx for the share.

Regards,
Ciwol.

[alexpgp]

Excellent tutorial.

My solution to .minidlna not being accessible was to chown it to the minidlna user:

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sudo chown minidlna:minidlna /home/pi/.minidlna

A more serious issue was the fact that all of my media had been uploaded to my Pi using owncloud, and for some reason, despite the 755 permissions on the music/video/photo directories specified in the minidlna config file, minidlna was being denied access to those directories. I addressed that by editing /etc/group and adding minidlna to the www-data group, like so:

Code: Select all

www-data:x:33:minidlna

A subsequent reload of minidlna threw no directory access errors.

Cheers...

[Mrquarter]

Great job, going to try this tomorrow when my raspberry pi shows up in the mail!

[jhiamnot]

Not sure if anyone encountered this issue before, but the minidlna service runs with the user minidlna who would not have permission to create the dir in /home/pi (db_dir=/home/pi/.minidlna).
I have to manually create it and grant permissions -
mkdir /home/pi/.minidlna
chmod 777 /home/pi/.minidlna

Else it wouldn't scan my specified media folders.

Cheers!

Thanks! This worked great!

[Mark2013]

Unfortunately, this tuto is not well researched, not well written. The author of it needs some help. I'm too much a novice to offer any.

My results:

pi@raspbmc:/media/storage$ sudo service minidlna start
parsing error file /etc/minidlna.conf line 18 : * "A" for audio (eg. media_dir=A,/media/storage/music)
parsing error file /etc/minidlna.conf line 19 : * "P" for pictures (eg. media_dir=P,/media/storage/pictures)
parsing error file /etc/minidlna.conf line 20 : * "V" for video (eg. media_dir=V,/media/storage/videos)
[2014/01/27 12:57:28] utils.c:265: warn: make_dir: cannot create directory '/home/pi/.minidlna'
[2014/01/27 12:57:28] minidlna.c:529: fatal: Database path not accessible! [/home/pi/.minidlna]
pi@raspbmc:/media/storage$ cd /home/pi
pi@raspbmc:~$ sudo mkdir /home/pi/.minidlna
pi@raspbmc:~$ sudo update-rc.d minidlna defaults
update-rc.d: using dependency based boot sequencing
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K05umountnfs.sh: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K05umountnfs.sh' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K08umountfs: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K08umountfs' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K02urandom: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K02urandom' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K09umountroot: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K09umountroot' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K04sendsigs: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K04sendsigs' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K10halt: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K10halt' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K01minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K01minidlna' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K04rsyslog: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K04rsyslog' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K01minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat S20minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat S20minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat S20minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat S20minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K10reboot: No such file or directory
insserv: warning: script 'K10reboot' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K05umountnfs.sh: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K08umountfs: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K02urandom: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K09umountroot: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K04sendsigs: No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat : No such file or directory
insserv: Can not stat K01minidlna: No such file or directory
insserv: script minidlna: service minidlna already provided!
insserv: exiting now!
update-rc.d: error: insserv rejected the script header

[DuncanH]

Not sure if anyone encountered this issue before, but the minidlna service runs with the user minidlna who would not have permission to create the dir in /home/pi (db_dir=/home/pi/.minidlna).
I have to manually create it and grant permissions -
mkdir /home/pi/.minidlna
chmod 777 /home/pi/.minidlna

Else it wouldn't scan my specified media folders.

Cheers!

I attached an external USB drive which was fomatted with NTFS. The permissions of an NTFS drive can't be changed using chmod so the answer was to mount the drive in /etc/fstab like this:

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UUID="YOUR UUID CODE" /media/usb ntfs-3g user,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=007 0 0

The umask 007 allows the user id 1000 and group id 1000 to read/write/execute, but restricts all others.
User id 1000 is the user "pi", and group id 1000 is the group "pi".
Then I added user minidlna to the pi group like this:

Code: Select all

usermod -aG pi minidlna

Now the minidlna user has access to the external drive (mounted at /media/usb) without having to use chmod 777 on everything.

It works for me.

[imsorrydave]

Great tutorial, thanks a lot.

+1 to tpereira and simonIOW I had the same problems as them and their code sorted me right out

[movax01]

Thanks a lot for such a clear guide.

It helped me a lot.

And thank you everybody for theirs comments and addons.

I love this Forum, I love my Rapspberry Pi.

[pedro74]

i've followed all the step, all works but minidlna re-create a brand new db across every reboot (i have a 2 tb content of music and a new db tooks an hour to be created...)
any suggestion?
thank you in advance

[bazzap2014]

Hi,

This tutorial has helped me a lot in getting my miniDLNA server up an running. However, I am having one annoying issue. The server works very well and I can reliably connect many different types of player to it: the TV, an iPad app, an android app, a Denon network media player, etc. However, after a period of time, say overnight, nothing connects any more. None of the players can find the server. The only solution I have found so far is to ssh into the RPI and restart the minidlna service. Everything's on the latest versions (I do an apt-get update and upgrade every week or so). I've had a quick scan of the log file but there's nothing obvious. Can anyone provide some pointers please? I'd really like to be able to run the RPI permanently and forget it.

For info, the media is located on an external USB hard drive. I also use this RPI as a backup location for all the Windows PCs on the network so the hard drive is samba mounted.

Many thanks,

Baz

[ronin47]

I'm running raspbmc with minidlna. I was running into the issue where my external media was not accessible. Something like below,

Code: Select all

[2014/12/12 14:23:28] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/Media" not accessible! [Permission denied]

My work-around was to use the GID of the active user (pi) of my external media. Since my username is pi I did the following,

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pi@raspbmc:/$ id pi
uid=1000(pi) gid=1000(pi) groups=1000(pi)

I changed the GID of the user minidlna since it can't run as pi (only root or minidlna)

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pi@raspbmc:/$ sudo usermod -g 1000 minidlna
pi@raspbmc:/$ id minidlna
uid=107(minidlna) gid=1000(pi) groups=1000(pi)

Then do a force-reload of minidlna,

Code: Select all

sudo service minidlna force-reload

This worked for me after following the instructions for this install.

[southafricanrob]

Hi,
Am wondering if it is possible to run a dlna player on the same raspberry pi ? I play files from the pi to my ipad and phone no problem but would also like to be able to initiate playing thought the HDMI of the pi connected to my TV. At the moment I am playing on my phone and then chromecasting to the TV - works fine but seems like a lot of extra pieces in the puzzle...
Thanks

[raspberryPat]

Hello,

***UPDATE*** : to let minidlna start automatically at boot.

If you use : sudo update-rc.d minidlna defaults
You get the following error message : update-rc.d: using dependency based boot sequencing

The insserv command must be used instead, if dependency-based booting is enabled:
insserv minidlna

For full explanation, see : https://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/ ... yBasedBoot

Happy hacking !