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DaveT

Member

Registered: 2019-09-22

Posts: 15  

Fun and games with UPnP servers on Arm64 Raspberry Pi

I'm running devuan Arm64 on a Kunbus Raspberry Pi industrial computer.
It's job is to be a server for my hifi system.
After 15 years I waved godbye to Sonos and moved on to a Cambridge Audio ONE media player. Because 'reasons'.
The Cambridge Audio ONE cannot work with samba - Richer Sounds lied to me is all I have to say!
It needs a UPnP media server.
OK, they exist, let's go to it...

1) gerbera
easy install, terrible documentation on setting up the gerbera.conf file. ALL of the documentation is bad.
With a bit of faffing it was sort of running but the Web GUI would NOT work. No way to add the audio fiiles into the sqlite database it uses.
Searching turned up no useful info.
I purged it.

2) minidlna
easy install. very little to modify in minidlna.conf.
Works!
Logs some FLAC errors but we are looking good.
The Cambridge One StreamMagic app seems happy and away we go!
Except. Some folders are empty. Why? No-one knows. Very little info on fixing issues.
If I can't fix the 'No Content' problem in the Captain Beefheart directories then another purge is coming on!
I did meet him in the early 1980s. Met Winged Eel fingerling too. Very gentle soft-spoken man.

I suppose I might not be clever enough to follow obscure documentation, but if I can't get it to work then it is useless to me.
Watch this space for how it all turns out!

Last edited by DaveT (2026-04-24 15:23:05)

greenjeans

Member

Registered: 2017-04-07

Posts: 1,610  

Website

Re: Fun and games with UPnP servers on Arm64 Raspberry Pi

Tagging for updates! Always interested in getting good music up and running

---

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DaveT

Member

Registered: 2019-09-22

Posts: 15  

Re: Fun and games with UPnP servers on Arm64 Raspberry Pi

For completeness: The Kunbus I am using is based on a Raspberry Pi 3.
I installed minidlna on my OpenBSD laptop.
The results were much the same - many albums missing, but the logging is much better!
Both the Kunbus and OpenBSD got to about 3500 FLAC files before they gave up.
OpenBSD minidlna.conf allows 4096 open files. I didn't try to increase that number.

If you don't have thousands and thousands of media files or just want to play with UPnP servers to try it out then minidlna is ideal.
Small, light, very little in the way of setup. It really does 'just work'.
But not well enough for me!
So I purged it.

DaveT

Member

Registered: 2019-09-22

Posts: 15  

Re: Fun and games with UPnP servers on Arm64 Raspberry Pi

That brings us to Jellyfin at jellyfin.org.
They have a debian version in their repository.
The online documentation is good.
I installed the 'extrepo' script and let it do its' thing.
The actual jellyfin install went without problems.
It expects to be stopped and started by systemd.
Hmm, what to do?
github.com/Labna/jellyfin-sysvinit
fixed that!

Jellyfin is mainly controlled using its comprehensive web interface.
I did that from my OpenBSD laptop.

It is taking hours to scan the external 500GB USB drive...
I left it running overnight, it had got to 87% this morning and I am certain it has crashed!
Some investigation to do then.

Possibly, just possibly, a Raspberry Pi 3 isn't quite up to running Jellyfin... We'll see!

DaveT

Member

Registered: 2019-09-22

Posts: 15  

Re: Fun and games with UPnP servers on Arm64 Raspberry Pi

Yes Jellyfin crashed at 87% because it ran out of memory.
However, load of albums were there in the web interface and tracks could be played hrough my laptop speakers.
Jellyfin works on a Raspberry Pi 3, I quite like it, and I hope to get running as it should.

So I created a 1GB /swapfile and restarted jellyfin which is tootling along nicely if a bit slow because of having to use the swapfile.
If you can, get a Raspberry Pi with as much RAM as possible if you want to run Jellyfin!
Mine has 905MB of available RAM and is using 808MB of swap.

Permissions for external USB drives can be a pain. Adding this line in /etc/fstab solved that!
UUID=Your-USB-drive  /mnt/Verbatim   vfat    defaults,noatime,users,umask=000,rw,auto 0 0
I'm using a 500GB Verbatim USB drive for my media files. I mount it on /mnt feel free to bung it somewhere else.

Because of the 500+ albums and 6000+ tracks I'm not sure of an easy way to work out if anything is missing.

Last edited by DaveT (Today 12:44:08)

DaveT

Member

Registered: 2019-09-22

Posts: 15  

Re: Fun and games with UPnP servers on Arm64 Raspberry Pi

Jellyfin is serving audio to my laptop.
But does it work with the Cambridge Audio ONE Network media player?
No.
What?
It's a feature!
DNLA capability for Jellyfin has been removed from the base install and is now a Plugin.

In the web interface click on Plugins.
The page opens up and shows what is installed.
Click on Available.
Scroll down to DNLA and click on it.
It works! First time use is a lot slow. Might speed up for 2nd etc use.
Not a really bad problem if the interface is slow, just a bit tedious. Nothing money and a more powerful Raspberry Pi won't fix!

I am generally pleased with how things have worked out.
Jellyfin has found all the album art etc. I could do with something better than an old iPhone to control it now!

Last edited by DaveT (Today 13:50:59)