Minidlna media not showing on all clients

Question

I wonder if anyone could help with this minidlna issue i an observing.

I'm usng a pi3 model b as a samba and minidlna server, and on the whole it is configured and working correctly. the problem I have is that not all of the media in the shared folders is showing on all of the clients. The titles are not showing, but other titles in the share are there and playable. this is apparent particularly one brand of TV.

Prior to using the pi as a server, I had used both a Popciorn Hour and Android box with DLNA servers, both of which worked with the same media that is not showing now, so I know the TV's in question are capable of playing this media. I'm even using the same hard drive as was used with the android box. The media plays ok on other brand TV's, windows and android devices.

Suggesting the TV is somehow the problem, but has worked with different servers.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

I have managed to solve this. I also noticed other media was missing, and when looking at the file naming convention, the missing files on the affected TV's all had additional '.' in the filename (eg Film.Title.Year.mp4) but were showing on the unaffected TV's correctly, so MiniDlna was serving them out, yet I know that the affected TV's were able to work with this filename convention with the popcorn and android servers previously used, so feel there is some compatibility issue between the MiniDlna and TV's.

Reading up a bit about MiniDlna, while it will work, it advises against using FAT file system. My external drive is mounted as vfat so maybe this could be the cause, due to the short naming convention etc.

Hope this may help anyone else if they have similar issues and come across this post. Temporary solution was to rename the files. Longer term I will have a script that I can run that replaces or removes all but the final file extension dot in the filename.

Mike.