Background

With a recent upgrade of the ReadyNAS firmware, Infrant (now Netgear) introduced the streaming service “ReadyDLNA”.  This is actually an open source project (”minidlna”) initiated by a Netgear engineer.  This DLNA (”Digital Living Network Alliance”) streaming service is capable of delivering audio, video, and pictures to a number of DLNA-compliant media players.

The ReadyDLNA service works quite well but does not provide a means of specifying multiple media directories in the ReadyNAS web administration interface.  It also does not expose the capability to assign “roles” to the different directories through the web interface.

Setup

In order to access the necessary configuration files, the EnableRootSSH patch must first be successfully installed.  Enhancements to the web interface to permit easier access to these “hidden” configuration options have been promised for future versions, but currently the only means of altering them is through directly editing the configuration files.

To add multiple media directories for the ReadyDLNA service:

1. Login (via ssh) as “root” to the ReadyNAS appliance.
2. Navigate to the configuration directory.

   cd /etc

3. Make a backup of the original configuration file for safety.

   cp minidlna.conf minidlna.conf.orig

4. Edit the minidlna.conf file by creating additional “media_dir” entries with the appropriate path.  For the ReadyNAS appliances, all the data is typically stored on a single volume (“/c”) with the sharepoint name being the next item on the path and then the directory name(s).

   media_dir=/c/media/Music
media_dir=/c/media/Videos
media_dir=/c/media/Pictures
media_dir=/c/torrents/BitTorrent

5. Restart the ReadyDLNA service.  (The easiest way to do this is to simply reboot the ReadyNAS appliance.)

Another “hidden” feature of the minidlna service is the ability to assign roles to the different media directories.  This can help restrict the type of content listed for a particular playback device.  There are three roles that may be assigned:  Audio (“A”), Video (“V”), and Pictures (“P”).  If no role is assigned to a media directory, then all media types will be indexed.

To assign roles to the media directories:

1. Login (via ssh) as “root” to the ReadyNAS appliance.
2. Navigate to the configuration directory.

   cd /etc

3. Make a backup of the original configuration file for safety.

   cp minidlna.conf minidlna.conf.orig

4. Edit the minidlna.conf file “media_dir” entries by specifying the role (“A”, “V”, or “P”) before the path.  The role and path should be comma-delimited.

   media_dir=A,/c/media/Music
media_dir=V,/c/media/Videos
media_dir=P,/c/media/Pictures
media_dir=V,/c/torrents/BitTorrent

5. Restart the ReadyDLNA service.  (The easiest way to do this is to simply reboot the ReadyNAS appliance.)