DLNA

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Working page for Amahi DLNA, the Amahi port of MiniDLNA. It makes your Amahi HDA the best media server for all your clients.

What is DLNA? Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a non-profit organization responsible for defining interoperability guidelines to enable sharing of digital media between multimedia devices. The guidelines are built upon existing public standards.

Amahi has other media server applications available:


NOTE:

  1. The majority of the guidance here is specific to Fedora and may not apply to Ubuntu. We hope to revise soon.
  2. DLNA does not support server "transcoding" on the fly.

Tips

  • You can configure its options in the ".conf" file in:

Fedora: 

       /var/hda/apps/dlna/amahi.conf

Ubuntu: 

       /etc/minidlna.conf
  • One section of the ".conf" file allows for changing where the directory locations where media files are stored.
# set this to the directory you want scanned.
# * if have multiple directories, you can have multiple media_dir= lines
# * if you want to restrict a media_dir to a specific content type, you
#   can prepend the type, followed by a comma, to the directory:
#   + "A" for audio  (eg. media_dir=A,/home/jmaggard/Music)
#   + "V" for video  (eg. media_dir=V,/home/jmaggard/Videos)
#   + "P" for images (eg. media_dir=P,/home/jmaggard/Pictures)
media_dir=A,/var/hda/files/music <======================================= music
media_dir=V,/var/hda/files/movies <====================================== videos
media_dir=P,/var/hda/files/pictures <==================================== photos, pictures
  • Another section of the ".conf" file allows for setting the name of the Amahi DLNA server.
# set this if you want to customize the name that shows up on your clients
friendly_name=Amahi Media Server <============================================ set DLNA server name
  • It has some Tivo support.
  • It picks up new files added automatically (as opposed to uShare).
  • Check the log file for the app at:

Fedora: 

       /tmp/minidlna/minidlna.log

Ubuntu: 

       /var/log/minidlna.log

Transcoding Software

In cases where the DNLA Players cannot support a video format, utility software on a client workstation can be used for "transcoding". The final transcoded file(s) then can be uploaded to an Amahi media directory. 

Definition: transcoding
The direct digital-to-digital data conversion of one encoding format to another, such as video or audio 
data files. Such as cases where a "target" device does not support a source format.

Troubleshooting

  • If you have problems where DLNA cannot see some files, it may be due to some ownership/permissions issues. You can do this (change the path and USERNAME accordingly):
bash code
​cd /var/hda/files/movies && chown -R USERNAME:users *​

NOTE:
Some Amahi applications that share the same media files require specific ownership/permissions to media directories and files.

In the case of Fedora the following could apply:

bash code
​cd /var/hda/files/ chown -vR apache:users movies chmod -vR 775 * cd movies chmod -vR 775 *​
  • If you installed too early, uninstall DLNA, uninstall RPM Fusion (Non-free) and RPM Fusion, in that order, refreshing each time the available apps page in your HDA.
  • If you suddenly realize that ONLY a part of your library is delivered by your amahi-dlna server to your clients you (most probably) have add a file to the library that forces dlna daemon parser to crash. Check this out if this is the case.

DLNA Players

There is no list of Amahi Certified DLNA Players because most (99.999%) of clients will work. The client has to support the format of the file that the server is streaming. Not all clients support all the formats. Typically DivX format are widely supported, but newer formats like Matroska may not be supported by some clients.

Below you will find a list of some client devices/applications. Feel free to add your client and what features it supports.

WD TV Live

At the moment, with a WD TV Live player, we can stream from .avi files to full 1080p content from this server.

With Matroska files it also supports subtitles in various languages and multiple audio tracks.

PS3

Notes on working state with PS3.

Playing avi and mkv files (mostly with h.264 content) worked great! Video seems to be working nicely!

Playing of mp3-files has been no problem - worked fine.

Xbox 360

Notes on working state with Xbox 360:

  • Install Amahi-dlna
  • Turn on Xbox 360 and Navigate to My Xbox
  • Scroll to the right until you see Music Library
  • Hit "A" on your controller.
  • Amahi should be one of your choices if amahi-dlna was installed correctly.

Repeat for Picture Library.

O!Play Air

Notes on working state with O!Play Air

Samsung TV with Media@ capability

The TV will play all media (pictures, music, movies) over WLAN/LAN, in TVs like the Samsung with Media@ features, no problem.

Windows Media Center

Windows 7 (Ultimate pre-release) Media Center will display pictures and play music. Video doesn't work.

Windows Media Player 11

On Windows 7 the Windows Media Player 11 shows successfully the Amahi-Server. On Windows XP this doesn't work.

VLC Media Player

The VLC Media Player by VideoLAN will connect to a DLNA server on various operating system platforms. DLNA integration has substantially improved since VLC version 2.

On Linux and Windows releases DLNA can be used as follows:

  • Run VLC. On the menu bar select, View, and on the dropdown menu, select playlist.
 
  • On the Playlist menu on the left side of VLC select "Universal Plug'n'Play". The Amahi Media Server should appear in the main screen area of VLC.
 
  • Navigate through the Amahi Media Server tree until you find some content to play.
 
  • Right click on a media file name, when the pop-up menu appears, click on "Play".

4u2stream

The client which is available at http://4u2stream.4u2sites.com works under windows xp.

Moxi

Music, video, and pictures all work perfectly on Moxi. Go to Media Link on the Moxi menu, and Amahi shows up in the list of media servers, complete with a Penguin for the logo.

TerraTec NOXON iRadio

Working, no changes are needed, by default a server called Amahi appears in the list of the home menu.

FAQs

  • Q: Does it support Matroska (.mkv) files?: Yes!
  • Q: Can it stream .iso files?: Nope
  • Q: Can it stream full DVDs: Nope, only the VOB files
  • Q: Does it have support for album art and covers?: Yes!
  • Q: Does it have support for subtitles?: Yes!
  • Q: Does it transcode on the fly while streaming?: Nope
  • Q: I added additional share locations into the config file but they do not appear!: try removing files.db under /tmp/minidlna/ and restarting the amahi-dlna service

Playlists

TBD

Update to latest minidlna

Coming soon...

 

 

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