Month: August 2013

Since our old TV died, today our family bought a new flat-screen for the living room from Amazon: LG Electronics 55LN5700 55-Inch 1080p 120Hz LED-LCD HDTV with Smart TV (2013 Model)

I’m an Open Source advocate, so I was happy to learn that LG uses Open Source software for this particular TV family, since the User Manual contained a legal hint about Open Source Software.

This TV is pretty good, the installation is very easy. It comes with a quite advanced and progressive onscreen menu. This menu actually was the decisive factor for buying it. The best part is that it has a built-in browser (it seems to be webkit-based) and supports regular keyboard and mouse via a bluetooth dongle connected to one of the 3 available USB ports (I’m using a combined keyboard and mouse dongle from Logitech). The mouse cursor is attractive. The browser works fine for YouTube too. This is our Logitech wireless set from Amazon: Logitech Wireless Combo Mk520 With Keyboard and Mouse

There also is an LG App-Store for Games and other funny stuff, but since it requires a registered account, I haven’t tried that yet.

This TV also supports Media sharing from various PCs in the intranet via the DLNA system. Initially afraid that this would be all proprietary Windows stuff, it turned out that there are at least two good Open Source DLNA servers are part of the Debian distribution.

The first one I tried is rygel, but had medium successes with it. It worked when I ran it as root, but failed for some reason when I wanted to run it as an unprivileged user. Also, it didn’t come with an init.d script. Since I’m generally very busy, I immediately looked for an alternative.

The second server is minidlna, and I had immediate success with it. It is very thin and does an excellent job at serving media, all that is needed, and et even comes with an init.d script. Just do:

apt–get install minidlna

and the server is up and running. Then I tweaked /etc/minidlna.conf in the following way:

• point media_dir to the folder where your media (pictures, videos, music) lives on your hard drive. In my case, this is also a folder shared by Samba, so that everyone in the house can copy media there and immediately watch it on the TV.
• Uncommented log_dir and db_dir, but left the default values
• As root_container I selected B, so that you can browse the acutal directory structure
• set inotify=yes
• set notify_interval=60

Then restart the minidlna service. Browse to port 8200 of your server to see a short HTML status message about the number of indexed files.

Then I ran into a problem: Moving a new media file into the folder wasn’t recognized by minidlna. It is supposed to be informed by new media by inotify, but it wasn’t. I found the fix here. Stop the service, delete /var/lib/minidlna/files.db, then start the service again. Now minidlna is immediately informed about new media files.

Considering that most of the entertainment technologies out there are proprietary and closed, the chance of success was extremely slim, but here it is anyway: GNU/Linux media server on a mainstream TV!