minidlna, redux

I haven’t used minidlna is quite some time, but as I was trying to get a friend into streaming, I thought it was time for a revisit, not only for my own re-edification, but for two reasons: First, Roon does not support streaming video; minidlna gives me a handy way to do that using VLC. Second, I don’t have all my digital audio in my Roon library. I reserve that for lossless or better digital files that Roon can easily recognize and tag properly.

I started with this old post – which is a GREAT place to start. But had a few issues, foremost, minidlna didn’t load any music from my mounted RAID drive on my computer! To troubleshoot why nothing was there, I checked user permissions on the folder:

sudo -u minidlna ls -al /mnt/data/Music/napster

Access denied! Fair enough.

First thing I did was add the user “minidlna” to the “user” group.

sudo usermod -a -G "user" minidlna

Then verify it added:

user:~/Desktop$ id minidlna
uid=131(minidlna) gid=137(minidlna) groups=137(minidlna),1000("user")

Next, I had to check the permissions of the drive I have at /mnt/data/. Ends up that it was created with 755 so I changed it to 775 so the group had access to the mount point and gave others read and execute:

sudo chmod 775 /mnt/data
sudo chmod o+xr <folder>

Next, reboot and check again. It worked:

I’m using VLC locally as it’s a very easy and useful front end for mindlna/UPnP servers, and Bubblesoft remotely (because I did all those years ago) but further interacting with clients I’ll save for the next post.

Quick note: Artwork wasn’t turning up when I added it, but after I killed minidlna and did a rescan, it appeared.

sudo service minidlna stop
sudo minidlnad -R

On the web:
Minidlna

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