HT's Ramblings: Integration between SmartTV and miniDLNA Server Ubuntu

I have a DLINK NAS server that houses all my music. Up to now, I have been using the NAS' internal DLNA feature to catalogue my music for any external media client. It works well but the cataloguing is extremely slow, it would take over 10 hours to rescan and it has be done manually each time I put some new music into this server.

In the past, I have played with other media server such as PLEX (you can find my post here). PLEX did a fantastic job but I have since abandoned as I found that my Ubuntu machine was too underpowered to serve up the video content. This time since I only want to catalogue music, I decided to try something light-weight.

If you have read my previous posts, I have also installed Ubuntu MPD. MPD works wonderfully (see my post here) however it does not act as a DLNA server. In other words, it is not self-discoverable on the client side; you need to connect to the MPD via some kind of software such as the Android MPDroid or Windows Auremo. Or, maybe there is a way but this grasshopper has not figured out how to expose it like a DLNA).

A quick search around the net, I found two choices: mini-DLNA or MediaTomb for Ubuntu OS. I first opted for MediaTomb but for some reasons, it would not install into my version of Ubuntu properly. And since mini-DLNA promises to be more light-weight, I decided to give it a try.

Once I located this journal https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MiniDLNA, honestly there is nothing special to note.

Update Nov 2015: the recent Ubuntu 14.04 no longer has the minidlna package, I had to now run a few more commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:djart/minidlna
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install minidlna

Point the config file (/etc/minidlna.conf) to the NAS drive and bam! it has catalogued all my music in seconds! There is no UI or web access to this utility. It has a log file to tell you what has been done, so the best way to experience it is to see your music appears on the TV.

Before I go there, here are some default file/directories you may want to take note (for me to keep track as well):

/etc/: for some reason, the minidlna.conf is located here
/var/cache/minidlna: this is where the music catalogued database is: files.db
/var/log: the minidlna.log is found here

Also, you may receive some weird errors about :...Inotify max_user_watches [8192] is low or close to the number of used watches...". A quick search on the web, I found this useful journal to help me fix it: http://www.techjawab.com/2013/05/how-to-configure-inotify-to-work-with.html

So here are some of the screen shots from my LG smartTV: