Its 2015 and I am really tired of copying movies to pen drive for watching on TV. Thanks to Chromecast on TV, Localcast App on phone and miniDLNA on laptop, I can flawlessly stream media from phone or laptop to TV. And yes, subtitle is working. With HDMI CEC support I can play and pause from TV remote as well. With YuppTV app I can stream Indian TVs well. These are the steps I followed to install and configure miniDLNA on my Acer netbook running CentOS 7.1.
Install Nux Desktop repository
wget http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop- release-0-1.el7.nux.noarch.rpm
sudo yum localinstall -y nux-dextop-release-0-1.el7.nux.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm –import http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/RPM-GPG-KEY-nux.ro
sudo yum repolist
Reference
http://www.unixmen.com/nux-dextop-a-desktop-and-multimedia-oriented-rpm-repository/
Install miniDLNA
sudo yum install -y minidlna
Configure miniDLNA
The following is my configuration
grep -v ^# /etc/minidlna.conf | grep -v ^$ port=8200 user=root media_dir=A,/home/brm/music media_dir=V,/home/brm/videos friendly_name=bacer album_art_names=Cover.jpg/cover.jpg/AlbumArtSmall.jpg/albumartsmall.jpg/AlbumArt.jpg/albumart.jpg/Album.jpg/album.jpg/Folder.jpg/folder.jpg/Thumb.jpg/thumb.jpg inotify=yes enable_tivo=no strict_dlna=no notify_interval=900 serial=12345678 model_number=1
Disable firewalld
sudo systemctl disable firewalld
sudo systemctl stop firewalld
Disable Selinux persistently, this required reboot
vim /etc/selinux/config
SELINUX=disabled
Enable miniDLNA
sudo systemctl enable minidlna
Start miniDLNA
sudo systemctl start minidlna
Issue
I was unable to view the media files. To fix this, I had to grant 755 permission to /home/brm, as well /home/brm/videos and /home/brm/music.
I use Localcast app on my phone to cast movies and music to Chromecast. Localcast integrates with http://www.opensubtitles.org/ for subtitles and it’s working really well. Since it’s really working well for me, I ended up buying the pro version mainly to get rid of the Ad.
With HDMI CEC support in my TV, I can use my TV remote to Play and Pause which is really cool.
I also tested Plex Media Server which is more capable but I don’t really need the extra features. I contemplated RasberryPi and Kodi ( XMBC) but I will have to spend some money. Since I already have the resources in the from of Chromecast and an old netbook, I decided to use what I already have.
I am happy.
I have a Ubuntu Desktop, so followed the steps above changing few
Ubuntu has built in so you can install minidlna without the Nux Desktop repository steps
sudo apt-get install minidlna
Copy pasted the above configuration changing the media_dir parameter alone to my settings.
gksudo gedit /etc/minidlna.conf
Start the minidlna service
sudo update-rc.d minidlna defaults
sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna start
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How’s it working for you with Chromecast?
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Good write up but instead of disable firewall totally, you should open the ports needed for DLNA.
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Well, as the laptop running this service isn’t the gateway to my home network, I don’t see the need to run firewall on it.
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