Why Samsung TV “loses” the minidlna server

    I’ll write a short post only because I myself suffered for a long time and looked for an answer to it, but in the end I had to figure it out myself.

    We have:
    - Samsung TV with the function of SMART TV and, accordingly, AllShare, which replaces DLNA support, as people say, because somewhere somewhere they do not meet the specifications and therefore they could not name it DLNA. Well, God bless him, I decided not to understand these subtleties.
    - A home server on Linux, which downloads, stores and shows movies on TV through this same DLNA. As a DLNA server, minidlna was chosen by poking a finger into the sky in Fedor's repository.

    Problem:
    - we regularly encounter the fact that we want to watch this very movie, turn on the TV ... and do not have our server in the SOURCE list or in the AllShare interface. It's a shame. Especially when guests come and you tell them with enthusiasm how cool you are showing the new TV, that you have your own server and on it we will now select high-resolution movies.

    After restarting minidlna, the TV server immediately finds it. I could not find the answer to the question formulated in the heading, or close in form. I also could not find anywhere in an accessible form information on how DLNA works at the network level (just don’t need to poke fingers into the English-language full protocol specifications, it’s also quite difficult to figure it out, I'm not going to write my own implementation of it). And only by the methoda deep analysis of poking buttons and examining the output of tcpdump, I realized how it works and what the problem is.

    So: the
    minidlna server sits to itself and listens to the port (which one you set in the settings), and occasionally broadcasts what it is here. But the TV turns on and for some reason does not interrogate anything about whether there is anyone here. And it turns out that from the moment the TV is turned on until the minidlna server gives signs of life, the TV knows nothing, and what the “update” button does is a great mystery (at least for me). And this becomes a problem, since you usually turn on the TV just to watch a movie.

    Solution:
    maybe there are more correct solutions, but I stupidly set the parameter in the minidlna config (by default in the Fedor /etc/minidlna.conf)
    notify_interval=30
    I think you can put less, but enough for me to be happy. That is, the maximum wait until the TV sees the server is 30 seconds. By default, this parameter in the Fedorov package is set to 900, that is, a wait time of up to 15 minutes is obtained.

    Also popular now: