Minidlna patch for LG TVs

June 7th 2016

One year ago I wrote about using the ushare DLNA server for watching 3D stereo mpo images. In the meanwhile minidlna evolved and is now also capable of displaying the mpo file format. This led me to switching to minidlna as DLNA server, since it is the better DLNA-server for general use. In example it supports features like fast forward and fast rewind, which ushare does not support. Unfortunately there are problems with minidlna in conjunction with some LG TVs. These TVs spam the DLNA-servers in the network with search requests, which leads to full CPU-load on the DLNA-server and unresponsiveness of the TVs user interface.¹ This even occurs when watching TV. I also experienced problems with harddisk recordings like the timeshift feature of the TV when network is connected. One may find out that the user interface of the TV is much smoother without network connection on these TVs. In the following I will show how to patch minidlna for not responding to these requests.

First of all download my patch against mindlna-1.1.5:

minidlna_lg_nosearch.patch.gz (5728 downloads )

The patch is based upon falk0069s older minidlna patch.² In case a LG device sends a search request, the minidlna-server just responds with 0. This removes load from both, the TV and the server and therefore leads to a better responsiveness. The patch should also work with current head.

Second download the minidlna-sources from:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/

Afterwards extract the minidlna-sources, change into the source directory and patch the sources:

cat minidlna_lg_nosearch.patch.gz | gunzip| patch -p1

Then build the sources by running ./configure and make.

Users of Debian-based arm-distributions like bananian might try out my prebuilt binary. One can download it from here: minidlnad.gz (5624 downloads ) . After downloading unzip the binary and replace the binary of your existing minidlna installation with it.

Jürgen

References:

1.https://sourceforge.net/p/minidlna/bugs/182/

2https://sourceforge.net/p/minidlna/patches/102/