mediatomb unstable and perfomance-eating

Hello!

I just installed debian on the dockstar and so far, it works very nice. Now I wanted to enhance the system by installing "mediatomb" via apt.
I have thousands of digicam-pictures and a few hundred mp3.
Unfortunately, it does not seem to be very stable. After starting, the load goes up to 3-4 and keeps burning the cpu even after several hours.
I tried gmediaserver, but that eats all ram withing seconds.
Is anybody out there using that on the dockstar or knows a similar media server software that does not need so much resources?

I've been using minidlna on another computer (not yet on my DockStar). It's much lighter-weight than mediatomb, although it doesn't have a web interface, just a text config file.

It's not yet available in Debian, but I've done a preliminary packaging for it that I hope will be accepted. It's easy to build from source though.

ecc Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've been using minidlna on another computer (not
> yet on my DockStar). It's much lighter-weight
> than mediatomb, although it doesn't have a web
> interface, just a text config file.
>
> It's not yet available in Debian, but I've done a
> preliminary packaging for it that I hope will be
> accepted. It's easy to build from source though.

Did you build static or dynamic? Could you give more details on how to build from source please.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/13/2010 06:27PM by PhantomsDad.

PhantomsDad Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Did you build static or dynamic? Could you give
> more details on how to build from source please.

I just ran "make", like it says in the INSTALL file. That builds a dynamically-linked executable. In Debian, the build-dependencies are:

libavformat-dev,
 libexif-dev,
 libflac-dev,
 libid3tag0-dev,
 libjpeg62-dev,
 libsqlite3-dev,
 libvorbis-dev,
 uuid-dev

Many many thanks!
That minidlna sounds promising! How can I get it running on the dockstar? It says it works on netgear devices.
I do not need a webfrontend, I just like to have my media served to two internet-radios.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/14/2010 09:46AM by gurkendoktor.

For those who can't wait for minidlna to make it into the debian repository, I've compiled a debian package of minidlna. This is intended for install on the dockstar debian system (squeeze). Download from

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11823414/minidlna/minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar_armel.deb

As root, install using

dpkg -i minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar_armel.deb

This command will likely tell you need a number of dependent libraries installed. You can individually install each of those, or install gdebi-core to do it in one command:

aptitude install gdebi-core
gdebi minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar_armel.deb

Use apt-get instead of aptitude if you prefer.

Edit /etc/minidlna.conf to your liking and restart minidlna.

/etc/init.d/minidlna restart

The packaging was done by stedy for ubuntu. I just changed the name of the deb file and compiled for dockstar debian. I got stedy's files here:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/stedy6/stedy-minidna/ubuntu/pool/main/m/minidlna/

For completeness, my source code and other debian files are:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11823414/minidlna/minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar.dsc
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11823414/minidlna/minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar.tar.gz
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11823414/minidlna/minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar_armel.changes

Enjoy

Thank you, Sir!
I installed it yesterday and since then, it works great. I have 2 internet radios in use here and it was no problem to get them connected.
The system load is low and the device is still spinning down the harddisk. With the other programs, it seems to run day and night.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2010 02:45AM by gurkendoktor.

gurkendoktor Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thank you, Sir!

My pleasure. I like that minidlna is really lightweight on the cpu and ram. Works great serving media to my WD TV Live Plus. But I am a bit disappointed that it doesn't support symlinks. I have a pretty large music, video, and picture library. So large that it is awkward to navigate through all the menus and lists. I was hoping I could set up minidlna as a kind of favorites queue, similar to the Netflix Instant Watch Queue. Put a few items into the queue and then I can easily select from the queue on the Western Digital. Symlinks would be the easiest way to add items from my library to the queue, since it wouldn't need to copy the files. Anybody know of a nice lightweight UPnP AV server that provides that kind of functionality?

If not, think I might dig in the code to see how hard it would be to support symlinks.

Hello!
Whats about making playlists? Doesn't this fit to your needs?

Hello,
I'm a debian newbie.
I have a fresh installed debian .
After installing minidlna with dpkg -i minidlna_1.0.18debian-dockstar_armel.deb I tried to resolv the missing packages without success.

root@debian:/tmp# apt-get install gdebi-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 gdebi-core : Depends: python (< 2.7) but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: python (>= 2.5) but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: python-central (>= 0.6.11) but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: python-apt (>= 0.7.97) but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: python-debian (>= 0.1.15) but it is not going to be installed
 minidlna : Depends: libavformat52 (>= 4:0.5.1-1) but it is not going to be installed or
                     libavformat-extra-52 (>= 4:0.5.1-1) but it is not installable
            Depends: libexif12 but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: libflac8 (>= 1.2.1) but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: libid3tag0 (>= 0.15.1b) but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: libjpeg62 (>= 6b1) but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: libogg0 (>= 1.0rc3) but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: libsqlite3-0 (>= 3.7.2) but it is not going to be installed
            Depends: libvorbis0a (>= 1.1.2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

Then I tried to resolv the missing dependencies package by package until:

root@debian:/tmp# apt-get install libavformat52 libexif12 libflac8 libid3tag0 libjpeg62 libogg0 libsqlite3-0 libvorbis0a libavcodec52 libavutil49  libdirac-encoder0  libfaad2  libgsm1  libopenjpeg2  libschroedinger-1.0-0  libspeex1  libtheora0  libvorbisenc2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libschroedinger-1.0-0 : Depends: liborc-0.4-0 (>= 0.4.3) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

But the liborc package could not be found. What can I do now?
Do I have to add another path in the /etc/apt/sources.list? Current content:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main non-free
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main

deb ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://ftp.au.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

The version number is part of the package name, so try "apt-get install liborc-0.4-0" and that should do it.

Hi all,

just for the records: I sucessfully compiled minidlna by myself and it was (my) _minidlna_ which was unstable and increasingly slowed down my poor new dockstar to a load of 20 (hardly was able to submit a "reboot" cmd).

I than tried PhantomsDad's readymade minidlna.deb which only asked for libjpg62 to install and otherwise runs smoothly after that.

Today I tried Debian's standard Mediatomb 12.0 which also runs smoothly, in contrast to Mr. Gurkendoktor's experience.

Could it be that a missing libjpg62 is causing the instabilities, regardless of minidlna/mediatomb?

Still deciding which one to keep. Minidlna better serves my Samsung B650 LCD TV. Otoh I was hoping to set up Mediatomb's Active Items to trigger some wake-on-lan/shutdown scripts for my main media server from my TV set.

Regards,
Heinz

I installed MediaTomb (after my minidlna package) and I don't see any performance or memory problems either.