I got the itch to setup a media server earlier this year.

I was intimidated by all the bells and whistles of Plex which seems to be “the” media server of choice for people who want something full-featured and polished. Really, all I wanted was to be able to download some youtube videos with youtube-dl and make them available to my downstairs TV/Xbox without the extra headache of moving a solid state drive around every time I wanted to download more.

Eventually I found my way to running MiniDLNA on my RaspberryPi which was already acting as a pseudo podcast feed server for another project. I wasn’t familiar with DLNA before this, but I’ve been really happy with how it all works.

• The MiniDLNA configuration is dead simple (just a single simple file where I put some paths marked as audio or video directories)
• Basically every device in my house has some DLNA client support (most devices via VLC and my Xbox via its own ‘Movies and TV’ app which is probably based on ye olde Windows Media Player)

The most frustrating part of setting everything up was getting the permissions right on my RaspberryPi so that all content could be hosted on a separate SSD which both MiniDLNA could read from and my youtube-dl scripts could write to. But once it was setup things have been smooth, and that frustration was mostly a consequence of me not understanding the interaction between different filesystem types and Linux’s permissions system.

I don’t have anything useful to share here. I just wanted to sing the praises of a pleasant software experience I had. It’s rare that something “just works” even when you think you’ve got the smallest, simplest application of that software. DLNA and MiniDLNA have made keeping my own home archive of youtube media really pleasant and easy to access. It’s changed the way that I enjoy some of my youtube media, and I think that’s pretty cool.