Tag Archives: dlna

Running minidlna on Mac

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These are my notes on installing [minidlna][minidlna], a [DLNA][dlna] server for Mac OS X. I compiled it from source and installed the supporting libraries from [MacPorts][macports].

Most of this was culled from [a thread on the minidlna forum][forum].

First install each of the following ports. The command for each would be something like `sudo port install libiconv`.

– libiconv
– sqlite3
– jpeg
– libexif
– libid3tag
– libogg
– libvorbis
– flac
– ffmpeg

Then check out the Mac branch of the current minidlna source from the CVS repository.

cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/minidlna checkout -r osx_port minidlna
cd minidlna

The current build script appears to miss out pulling in libiconv so I had to edit `configure.ac`, inserting a line to bring in `libiconv`.

AC_CHECK_LIB([iconv], [main],, AC_MSG_ERROR(Cannot find required library iconv.))

Now the build will work. Although I found I needed to run `autogen.sh` twice for it to generate all the necessary files.

source ENVIRONMENT.macports
sh genconfig.sh
sh autogen.sh
sh autogen.sh
./configure
make

This spits out the minidlna executable and a basic configuration file. Copy these to wherever you want them. Edit the `minidlna.conf` file, pointing it at the files you want to serve. There are examples of what to do in that configuration file.

And for testing purposes you can start the server from the build directory.

./minidlna -d -f minidlna.conf

Bingo.

I did try using [ushare][ushare], another DLNA server, but I couldn’t figure out how to persuade my Sony telly to successfully connect to it. So I gave up. I feel it is useful to give up quickly when something doesn’t work until you run out of alternatives, I consider this triage. I also consider my telly’s inability to work with ushare and the fact that the telly will only play a very limited set of video formats a mark against the promise of DLNA.

[minidlna]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/
[dlna]: http://www.dlna.org/
[forum]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/forums/forum/879956/topic/3412747
[macports]: http://www.macports.org/
[bravia]: http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/bravia-lcd-televisions
[ushare]: http://ushare.geexbox.org/