Why is the minidlna database not being refreshed

Question

I am developing a MiniDLNA server to stream media over WiFi   Existing files are shown properly  However  when I add new files to media folders the changes are not updated across MiniDLNA clients  I have also tried to restart the server but it does not reflect the changes   I changed inotify interval   60 but it s still not updating files db which is the MiniDLNA media list database  If I delete this database and restart the server it shows the changes   Does anyone know what the problem might be

User · Answer

There is a patch for the sourcecode of minidlna at sourceforge available that does not make a full rescan, but a kind of incremental scan. That worked fine, but with some later version, the patch is broken. See here Link to SF

Regards Gerry

User · Answer

AzP already provided most of the information  but some of it is incorrect   First of all  there is no such option inotify interval  The only option that exists is notify interval and has nothing to do with inotify   So to clarify  notify interval controls how frequently the  mini dlna server announces itself in the network  The default value of 895 means it will announce itself about once every 15 minutes  meaning clients will need at most 15 minutes to find the server  I personally use 1-5 minutes depending on client volatility in the network   In terms of getting minidlna to find files that have been added  there are two options    The first is equivalent to removing the file files db and consists in restarting minidlna while passing the -R argument  which forces a full rescan and builds the database from scratch  Since version 1 2 0 there s now also the -r argument which performs a rebuild action  This preserves any existing database and drops and adds old and new records  respectively  The second is to rely on inotify events by setting inotify yes and restarting minidlna  If inotify is set to  no  the only option to update the file database is the forced full rescan    Additionally  in order to have inotify working  the file-system must support inotify events  which is not the case in most remote file-systems  If you have minidlna running over NFS it will not see any inotify events because these are generated on the server side and not on the client   Finally  even if inotify is working and is supported by the file-system  the user under which minidlna is running must be able to read the file  otherwise it will not be able to retrieve necessary metadata  In this case  the logfile  usually  var log minidlna log  should contain useful information

User · Answer

I have recently discovered that minidlna doesn t update the database if the media file is a hardlink   If you want these files to show up in the database  a full rescan is necessary   ex  If you have a file  home movies foo mkv and a hardlink in  home minidlna video foo mkv  where   home minidlna  is your minidlna share  you will have to do a rescan till that file appears in the db  and subsequently your dlna client    I m still trying to find a way around this   If anyone has any input  it s most welcome

User · Answer

In summary  the most reliable way to have MiniDLNA rescan all media files is by issuing the following set of commands     sudo minidlnad -R   sudo service minidlna restart   Client-side script to rescan server  However  every so often MiniDLNA will be running on a server  Here is a client-side script to request a rescan on such a server      usr bin env bash ssh -t server on lan  sudo minidlnad -R  amp  amp  sudo service minidlna restart

User · Answer

Resolved with crontab root  10          usr bin minidlnad -r

User · Answer

MiniDLNA uses inotify  which is a functionality within the Linux kernel  used to discover changes in specific files and directories on the file system  To get it to work  you need inotify support enabled in your kernel   The notify interval  notice the lack of a leading  i    as far as I can tell  is only used if you have inotify disabled  To use the notify interval  ie  get the server to  poll  the file system for changes instead of automatically being notified of them   you have to disable the inotify functionality   This is how it looks in my  etc minidlna conf     set this to no to disable inotify monitoring to automatically discover new files   note  the default is yes inotify yes   Make sure that inotify is enabled in your kernel   If it s not enabled  and you don t want to enable it  a forced rescan is the way to force MiniDLNA to re-scan the drive

[dlna] Why is the minidlna database not being refreshed?

Examples related to dlna