I decided that I need a DLNA server on my network so that I can stream to my tablets/phones/smartTV's with ease. I already have media PC's at every TV however I wanted to test out the smart TV features on my TV.
Unfortunately there are no known pre-builds of any light weight DLNA servers for CentOS7. I selected miniDLNA which is now called ReadyMedia. miniDLNA is a light weight DLNA compliant server and best of all it comes pre-compiled as a static binary which does not need anything else to run.
Current version of miniDLNA at the time of writing is version 1.1.4 which was published in Aug 2014 so it is fairly recent.
Below are the steps I took to get this working :
1) download the tarball and uncompress it - it will create 2 directories etc and usr
2) copy the usr/sbin/minidlnad into /usr/sbin and chown root:root /usr/sbin/minidlnad
3) copy the etc/minidlna.conf to /etc/minidlna.conf and chown root:root /etc/minidlna.conf
4) create /var/cache/minidlna and chown root:root /var/cache/minidlna
5) edit /etc/minidlna.conf with the following
port=8200 # you can change this port to anything you like but I just left it default
network_interface=eth0 # change to your network interface. this is not really needed but to secure it down.
user=0 # uid of the user you want this to run as. I want it to run as root
media_dir=xxxxxx please read the documentation for this since you can have a simple setup or a complex one
I have 2 lines on mine
media_dir=A,/music
media_dir=V,/video
friendly_name=My DLNA Server # this can also be changed to whatever you like
db_dir=/var/cache/minidlna
log_dir=/var/log
inotify=yes
presentation_url=http://IPofyourmachine:8200/
you can leave everything else the default.
6) create /lib/systemd/system/minidlna.service with the following and chown root:root /lib/systemd/system/minidlna.service
[Unit]
Description=miniDLNA
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/minidlnad -R -f /etc/minidlna.conf
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
7) enable and start the service
systemctl enable minidlna.service
systemctl start minidlna.service
now you can take a look at /var/log/minidlna.log to see the logs from the service
[2015/04/15 21:19:50] minidlna.c:1026: warn: Starting MiniDLNA version 1.1.4.
[2015/04/15 21:19:50] minidlna.c:355: warn: Creating new database at /var/cache/minidlna/files.db
[2015/04/15 21:19:50] minidlna.c:1065: warn: HTTP listening on port 8200
Also you can browse to http://IP:8200/ to see the status of your DLNA server
I am not sure if transcoding works with the static binary but will test it out soon!
good luck
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