I’ve been moving round Linux distributions recently and currently find myself using (and rather enjoying) Arch Linux.

As my article on installing MiniDLNA on Ubuntu is so far my post popular, I though I’d document how I installed and configured it on Arch.

There is a MiniDLNA package for Arch in the community reposotory, meaning it can be installed very easily via Pacman (the following commands have been run as root, add sudo to the beginning of them if you have installed and configured it)

pacman -S minidlna

Once installed, edit the MiniDLNA configuration file and enter the paths of the media you wish to share, and, if you wish, rename your server.

I prefer to edit text files with nano, however you can swap nano for your editor of choice

nano /etc/minidlna.conf

Once you have configuration file open for editing add the following, remembering to update the paths

media_dir=A,/media/storage/Share/Music
media_dir=P,/media/storage/Share/Pictures
media_dir=V,/media/storage/Share/Videos

You can rename the name of your server by removing the the # from friendly_name and changing its name, for example

friendly_name=SERVER

Save the file and you are done, you can control the service using the initscript in /etc/rc.d, and you start MiniDLNA at boot my adding minidlna to you list of daemons in /etc/rc.conf

DAEMONS=(syslog-ng network crond dbus gdm networkmanager minidlna)

The MiniDLNA ArchWiki entry has an additional step that is optional which is to enable the MiniDLNA cache feature (a feature I do not use myself), this allows the database and album art to be cached.

mkdir /var/{cache,log}/minidlna
chown nobody:nobody /var/{cache,log}/minidlna

This will create the required directories and also set their permissions, once created you will need to add the paths to your minidlna.conf file

db_dir=/var/cache/minidlna
log_dir=/var/log/minidlna

Happy streaming.