Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

chimeracoder · 2012-01-16 23:19:53

I've installed Minidlna and set up my minidlna.conf according to the wiki page, but my files still aren't showing up in my client (in this case a phone).

When I start the minidlna daemon, this is what happens:

chimeracoder ~ $  sudo /etc/rc.d/minidlna start
:: Starting minidlna                                                     [BUSY] 
Media directory not accessible! [/home/chimeracoder/music]
                                                                         [DONE]

media_dir=A,/home/chimeracoder/music

(which I have tried with the A and P content-type tags as well, as well as without the tags, both with and without the trailing backslash for the directory).

The server itself starts properly, and my client does pick up the <hostname>: nobody server, but it shows only the default Music/Pictures/Videos folders (which are empty, and which are not contained anywhere on the computer where I am running minidlna).

According to the wiki, the files have to be readable by the nobody user, so I tried chowning the directory and its contents to nobody:nobody, as well as setting the permissions to 755 and 777, but again, no luck.

zenlord · 2012-01-17 08:29:57

My folders are owned by my own user (group users) and set to 755. In '/etc/conf.d/minidlna' I have 'nobody' set as the user to run minidlna from.

I have never seen that errormessage.

broken pipe · 2012-01-17 13:07:25

does the directory really exist?
does the error occur when you run it under root, not sudo?

chimeracoder · 2012-01-19 05:00:43

Yes, the directory does exist, and the same thing happens when I run it with sudo or in a root terminal.

And /etc/conf.d/minidlna only has the following line:

MINIDLNA_USER=nobody

The only thing I can think of is the group permissions - is 'nobody' supposed to belong to the users group (as my regular user does)? That doesn't make sense, because I get the same error when I chown the files to nobody:nobody, but it's the only thing I can think of.

zenlord · 2012-01-19 19:44:44

(you've probably already tried this, but nonetheless)

Have you tried setting MINIDLNA_USER to your username and chowning the files/folders to your name?

broken pipe · 2012-01-19 20:10:37

thats really weird.
already tried to uninstall minidlna, remove any left files, maybe stored under /var/cache/?
any pacnew file which waits to be merged?
chmod the folder to 755, files to 644, chown to your user, users in general?

mind sharing your minidlna.conf for debugging?

just an example what i did and in my case it works:
chmod 755 /media/files/Musik
chown -R markus:users /media/files/Musik/

/etc/conf.d/minidlna --> MINIDLNA_USER=nobody

/etc/minidlna

port=42900
network_interface=eth0

# 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,/media/files/Musik/
media_dir=V,/media/files/Videos/

# set this if you want to customize the name that shows up on your clients
friendly_name=Markus Desktop

# set this if you would like to specify the directory where you want MiniDLNA to store its database and album art cache
db_dir=/home/minidlna

# set this if you would like to specify the directory where you want MiniDLNA to store its log file
log_dir=/var/log

# this should be a list of file names to check for when searching for album art
# note: names should be delimited with a forward slash ("/")
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

# set this to no to disable inotify monitoring to automatically discover new files
# note: the default is yes
inotify=yes

# set this to yes to enable support for streaming .jpg and .mp3 files to a TiVo supporting HMO
enable_tivo=no

# set this to strictly adhere to DLNA standards.
# * This will allow server-side downscaling of very large JPEG images,
#   which may hurt JPEG serving performance on (at least) Sony DLNA products.
strict_dlna=no

# default presentation url is http address on port 80
#presentation_url=http://www.mylan/index.php

# notify interval in seconds. default is 895 seconds.
notify_interval=900

# serial and model number the daemon will report to clients
# in its XML description
serial=12345678
model_number=1

# specify the path to the MiniSSDPd socket
#minissdpdsocket=/var/run/minissdpd.sock

# use different container as root of the tree
# possible values:
#   + "." - use standard container (this is the default)
#   + "B" - "Browse Directory"
#   + "M" - "Music"
#   + "V" - "Video"
#   + "P" - "Pictures"
# if you specify "B" and client device is audio-only then "Music/Folders" will be used as root
#root_container=.

rembo10 · 2012-02-29 22:33:44

I had to chmod my home folder to get it to work.

chmod 755 /home/user

then minidlna could see my /home/user/Videos folder just fine.... had to delete the old /var/cache/minidlna/files.db to refresh the database also.

another option would be to run minidlna as your user, and just make sure you can write to the log & cache directories

kwhershey · 2012-08-27 23:15:54

I've been trying to run as my user, but I keep getting the error "chown: Invalid group" 'username:username'.

My /etc/conf.d/minidlna is just one line:

MINIDLNA_USER='username'

How do you specify the group? I tried "MINIDLNA_USER='group:username'" and adding the line "MINIDLNA_GROUP=users" but neither worked.

zenlord · 2012-08-28 08:05:28

I think I did that once, too. But it didn't work.

Reading the post by rembo10 makes me realize my setup is different: I do not serve my media from my home-folder, but from /srv/media/, so I can set the rights of that folder without tampering with permissions on my home-folder.

And I also noticed that the ArchWiki was expanded with a nice article on minidlna. Maybe you'll find the answer somewhere in there (and if you do, please report your solution...)

Last edited by zenlord (2012-08-28 08:05:43)

kwhershey · 2012-08-28 21:15:02

I am serving my media from another drive, which is giving me this error:

[2012/08/28 16:06:38] minidlna.c:474: error: Media directory "/media/storage/Music" not accessible! [Permission denied]

Here is my fstab line for the drive:

/dev/sdb1 /media/storage ntfs-3g defaults,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=002,umask=077,uid=1000 0 2

I added "nobody" to the users group so minidlna could have access, but I assume since it isn't being called from the users group, it doesn't have access? I don't know how to edit the fstab line to give the nobody user access.

Inxsible · 2012-08-29 04:25:59

see this thread :: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=145129

kwhershey · 2012-08-29 15:00:42

When trying to follow the steps given by MrWeatherbee, I get an error with

> setfacl -m u:minidlna:rx /media/storage

This is the corresponding line for my setup. Error is:

setfacl: /media/storage/: Operation not supported

Is this because I am not trying to serve out of my home directory, but off of a separate harddrive?

Strubbl · 2016-01-23 08:26:13

I tried to share a folder under /home/, too. For me the solution was to set ProtectHome=off in /lib/systemd/system/minidlna.service and afterwards the usual steps:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart minidlna.service

x33a · 2016-01-29 06:32:45

@Strubbl,

If you notice, the OP was not even using systemd, rather Arch Linux initscripts. A lot of things change over time, and this is why we discourage necrobumping.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fo … bumping.22

Closing.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-16 23:19:53

Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#2 2012-01-17 08:29:57

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#3 2012-01-17 13:07:25

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#4 2012-01-19 05:00:43

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#5 2012-01-19 19:44:44

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#6 2012-01-19 20:10:37

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#7 2012-02-29 22:33:44

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#8 2012-08-27 23:15:54

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#9 2012-08-28 08:05:28

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#10 2012-08-28 21:15:02

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#11 2012-08-29 04:25:59

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#12 2012-08-29 15:00:42

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#13 2016-01-23 08:26:13

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

#14 2016-01-29 06:32:45

Re: Minidlna: "Media directory not accessible!"

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