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.