I’ll be setting up a DLNA server on my Arch Linux machine to stream movies to my smart tv over my home network.

What is this?

If you don’t know what DLNA is, I’ll explain briefly. It was introduced in 2004 (20 years ago :O) and its purpose is to stream media files to other devices in the same network. It uses UPnP for media and device discovery.

Tutorial

I’ll be using the tool minidlna for its simplicity and following the guide in Arch Linux forums. So I will be using my own user and OpenRC, taking that into consideration. For that, create the config file in .config directory .

install -Dm644 /etc/minidlna.conf ~/.config/minidlna/minidlna.conf

Then edit it to specify my user, which is the one I use commonly. You can set multiple media directories. I’ll be just setting my Videos dir where I store my downloaded movies. The V, prefix indicated it is a video only folder.

user=$USER
media_dir=V,/home/$USER/Videos
db_dir=/home/$USER/.cache/minidlna
log_dir=/home/$USER/.config/minidlna

This little snippet inside the conf file explains it better:

# * if you want multiple directories, you can have multiple media_dir= lines
# * if you want to restrict a media_dir to specific content types, you
#   can prepend the types, 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)
#   + "PV" for pictures and video (eg. media_dir=PV,/home/jmaggard/digital_camera)

Finally, run it:

minidlnad -f /home/$USER/.config/minidlna/minidlna.conf -P /home/$USER/.config/minidlna/minidlna.pid -d

I append the -d flag so it doesn’t daemonize, but that’s just my preference of course.

You can visit http://192.168.100.10:8200/ (change it to your local IP) for a quick look at the discovered files and hosts.

My Smart TV talks to the server automatically.

I can check the files are found from the UPnP section in VLC.

Subtitles

DLNA supports subtitles as well. The way I figured it out to work was saving the .srt file with the video file’s name. i.e. your video is called American.Psycho.2000.UNCUT.REMASTERED.1080p.BluRay.H264.AAC-LAMA.mp4 so your subtitle file should be American.Psycho.2000.UNCUT.REMASTERED.1080p.BluRay.H264.AAC-LAMA.srt. Notice how the extension is the only difference. Store both files in the same directory.