Proving the Obviously Untrue

Last Sunday morning I tried to access my mediatomb UPnP music server using the radio in my kitchen to be told it was offline. After messing around at the radio end a bit, I went to check on the actual machine, and found that mediatomb was not running. Attempting to restart it looked OK, but it was segfaulting almost immediately.

After trawling around a bit on bugs.debian.org I finally found this little gem. Basically mediatomb has been removed from unstable, partly because it's (ahem) unstable. I can't disagree with anything Neil says here; it's been a pain to keep mediatomb working, and there have been many problems. Nevertheless, after solving these and generally having it working (till Sunday) I was frustrated that was the end of the road. Obviously Neil has had a bit of a backlash too.

Anyway, life goes on and I looked in the Debian archive for alternatives and found minidlna. I wasn't too optimistic from the package description, but thought I'd give it a whirl. It has no web interface, but I don't care about that. Anyway, I installed it, reconfigured the path, forced a database reload, and was very pleased to find it all worked out of the box. Far less hassle that mediatomb has proven.

Only a tiny grumble so far, while all the playlists appear, and are in the correct order, if you browse by Albums, or Artists, the eventual track list is always alphabetical and not track order. I've read some claims that this is due to the client, but every single client I have used to get the lists from mediatomb in track order, and every single one now gets in alphabetical order.

Time to dive into the source at some time...

Posted by Colin Turner