Raspberry Pi DLNA Media Server

Stream media from your Raspberry Pi to tablets, consoles, and other devices using MiniDLNA.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi (preferably running Raspbian)
• Stonking great USB hard drive full of music, movies, and other goodies. 

Why this rocks

• Because you won't have to lug around your stonking great hard drive all over your house.
• Because you'll have access to your media library from all devices.
• Because the Raspberry Pi runs silent. No fan noises.

Assumed knowledge

• You know how to access the terminal on your Raspberry Pi, either through the GUI, or through SSH on a remote machine.
• Your Raspberry Pi can connect to your home network.
• You have plugged your USB drive into your Raspberry Pi.  

Step: Auto-mount your External USB drive

Raspbian's window system might already auto-mount your USB drive. I.e. an icon for the drive might appear on your desktop. Take it from me though, this can cause a lot of hassle later as the window system tends to mount the drive after the media service is started, which means DLNA can't find the drive.

You want to configure Raspbian to auto-mount the drive before its window system starts. In short, this involves:

Creating a directory as a mount point, usually something like sudo mkdir /mnt/HDD

Finding the partition ID you want to mount with sudo blkid

Adding an entry to the /etc/fstab file with sudo pico /etc/fstab

Because I have an NTFS drive, I added the following line to my /etc/fstab file

PARTUUID=5dd83921-01 /mnt/HDD ntfs-3g defaults,nls=utf8,nofail,comments=x-gvfs-show 0 0

Your configuration will almost certainly be different. I thoroughly recommend this article for more information on fstab, although I didn't follow it exactly.

The official documentation is very useful too.

Step: Install MiniDLNA

In terminal:

sudo apt install minidlna

Step: Edit /etc/minidlna.conf

This is the standard location of MiniDLNA's configuration settings. To edit them, you can use:

sudo pico /etc/minidlna.conf

All you need is 2 settings:

1. Set user

user=pi

Why? Because your HDD is likely mounted under the default user account, 'pi', it's easiest to run MiniDLNA as the same user.

(The created account minidlna doesn't have access to external drives.)

2. Specify files and folders

Unfortunately, this means that you'll need to create a writeable location for the database and log files. So in a terminal, create a directory in your home folder. e.g.:

mkdir /home/pi/minidlna

and change db_dir and log_dir in minidlna.conf to use it.

Next, set the media folders in the config file. They will most likely be at paths like:

/mnt/HDD/Music

Tip: If you have multiple folders, just specify the smallest folder at this stage to make testing easier.

Test manual start

In terminal:

minidlnad

Crank up a media player on another device connected to the same network (e.g. VLC). 

Step: Configure Autostart

This is the hardest part.

MiniDLNA used to start at boot, but Raspbian now uses a different method to auto-start (systemd instead of init) and MiniDLNA has not adapted its startup scripts.

You don't want to have to manually start MiniDLNA every time you start your Raspberry Pi, so we need to write a systemd service for it and get it to run automatically.

Create the service file, give it the correct permissions, and edit it:

sudo touch /etc/systemd/system/minidlna.service
sudo chmod a+rx /etc/systemd/system/minidlna.service
sudo pico|leafpad /etc/systemd/system/minidlna.service

Here's what's in mine: ('#' denotes comments and can be omitted)

[Unit]
Description=minidlna, DLNA/UPNP-AV media server
RequiresMountsFor=/mnt/HDD

[Service]
Type=simple
# The -S flag runs minidlnad for systemd
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/minidlnad -S
# Run as default user 'pi'
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Every time you edit a systemctl service you need to reload it:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Test systemctl service start

Stop all minidlna processes and test starting via systemd:

sudo killall minidlna
sudo systemctl restart minidlna.service

Wait for a while, and you should be able to access your media library again. Now you can enable the service to be processed at startup:

sudo systemctl enable minidlna.service

Reboot, and MiniDLNA should auto-start!

Appendix

Useful systemctl commands

• [sudo] systemctl start|stop|restart <minidlna.service>
• [sudo] systemctl enable|disable <minidlna.service> (enable/disable autostart)
• [sudo] systemctl status <minidlna.service> (useful troubleshooting information).

Further Reading

• Raspberry Pi Media Server - MiniDLNA (Instructables.com) - My primary reference. Unfortunately does not cover systemd.
• Systemd (RaspberryPi.org) - How to create a new systemd service.