[Discuss] MythTV: from bad to worse. Start over?

[cra at WPI.EDU (Chuck Anderson)]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 10:38:04AM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Hey, Bill,
> 
> Bill Cattey <wdc at MIT.EDU> writes:
> 
> > We have a DLNA server at home that talks to our BluRay player.
> >
> > Sadly the first DLNA server we tried was not seen by the BluRay player.
> > The second one is seen but won't see new content unless we rebuild the
> > Db from scratch.  Our setup is a little strange in that the DLNA server is
> > running on a NetBSD box running or freeNAS server.  Part of the reason why
> > new content is not seen is that NetBSD and Linux have different approaches
> > to noticing a filesystem has changed.
> >
> > Chuck made it all work, perhaps he will chime in.
> 
> So what you are saying is that if you were using a Linux server then the
> DLNA server would have noticed new content properly?  ;)

The server is actually running on Linux, but the media files are
stored on the FreeNAS (FreeBSD) box which is mounted over NFS to the
Linux box.  The DLNA server uses inotify to notice changes in the
media store in order to update the DB on the fly, but that doesn't
work over NFS, hence the need to stop the server, delete the entire
database, and restart the server to add even a single new file.

> Could one use DLNA for MythTV recorded content?

I don't know.

> Which DLNA server(s) have you tried/used?

Minidlna is the one that works at all with a Sony Blu-Ray player.  It
can also transcode content using mencoder or ffmpeg to one that the
player supports.

I also tried fuppes and one other I can't remember the name of at the
moment.

All of it is crapware.  Minidlna in particular is a bunch of spaghetti
C code with special quirks and workarounds to special-case various
DLNA clients sprinkled throughout.  I'm seriously considering writing
a new DLNA server from scratch, even if it only supports the devices I
care about, and transcodes all content to a /single/ output format
rather than relying on the DLNA client's support for various different
media types.