HOWTO stream local media files to your Roku--Stretch

[kevinthefixer]

Had no trouble streaming across a Samba connection to my living-room TV set when it was another computer hooked to a projector, but I got tired of replacing projectors and bought a Roku TV. Roku's Media Player software does not support Samba. From the Roku Media Player manual:

To play content stored on another device or computer on your Roku device using DLNA, the other device must be running DLNA server software and must be on the same network as your Roku device.

Easy enough, minidlna is in the Stretch repositories, installing it was easy enough. I didn't expect it to work with no configuration, though, and I was right, but it actually didn't take much at all. The only thing I needed to change was the location of media files in /etc/minidlna.conf; it was set to /var/lib/minidlna/ which of course didn't have any media in it. For my purposes I replaced

Code: Select all

media_dir=/var/lib/minidlna

with:

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media_dir=V,/home/kevin/data/Videos
media_dir=A,/home/kevin/data/Music
media_dir=P,/home/kevin/data/Photos

and rebooted. Probably could have simply restarted the daemon. Anyway, I knew I'd done something right as it took the computer a few minutes of flashing the HDD light right after that, presumably updating minidlna's database; I have quite a collection of media files and they all live on a spinning disc. I let it do that, and then switched the TV to Roku Media Player and off we went. Found Aquaman for the better half and I haven't seen or heard from her since!