MiniDLNA on a raspi

One of the best things in life is that you never stop learning and/or discovering new and exciting things. Today was a great day in that sense. I discovered the set -u builtin which warns you if a variable is not set and also that it is good to talk to people to share ideas. (I've been talking to a cousin of mine for a long, long while this afternoon, interesting things).

But in respect to software, the discovery of the day/week/month and probably the whole year (hmm) was MiniDLNA. minidlna is a streaming server that can serve your files across the network to any device that supports the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol.

I was looking for a way to stream media from my raspi. Since I had only tried to do it once and it was with vlc, I installed vlc in my raspi and tried to stream video with it but it was almost impossible. It turned out to be a too resource intensive method.

Then I used a clever way of streaming media from my raspi to my network. I copied the files that I wanted to stream to /var/www and accessed the contents of that directory over http, either using vlc or just a web browser. But no matter how clever this idea is, it is not very handy. You have to do a lot of manual work.

Today I asked on irc and a friend of mine said he used minidlna. I installed and configured it follwowing a tutorial I found on the web. Basically what I did was to edit/etc/minidlna.conf with several settings that apply to my device. It is pretty simple and straightforward, and in case you do not know what to put in there, you can always use the default settings.

Then from another computer I launched vlc and went to View --> Playlist --> Local Network --> Universal Plug n' Play and there I could see all the files that I wanted to share. Impressive, huh?

And the best thing yet to come, minidlna does not stress your raspi cpu at all. While working, it only used 0.3% of the cpu power.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2966 minidlna 20 0 37332 5824 552 S 0.3 1.3 0:00.22 minidlna

weechat's relay plugin

Most irc people I know use either one of these combinations:

screen + irssi

or

tmux + weechat

I'm not an expert at all in any of them, but I have used both of them for several years now. And after configuring screen + irssi to get my perfect setup (combination of scripts, utf-8 support and so on and so forth). I decided it was time to make the switch to tmux + weechat.

I'm not going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of them because everyone has their own preferences and that is fine by me.

One feature that I'm really interested in is the proxy/relay feature of both irssi and weechat. I already wrote about irssi proxy a while ago. So I decided to explore both weechat relay plugins named irc and weechat. I wrote a complete tutorial on how to configure them, but specifically for sdf-eu users. Here is the link:

Weechat tutorial

I hope you find it useful.

pharc flowchart

This it the flowchart for pharc, my 'phlog archiver'. It is my first flowchart. I started drawing it with dia but I ended up using google docs. You can see an up-to-date version here