How to Install Serviio a DLNA Media server in Linux

Serviio is a free DLNA media server. It allows you to stream your media files (music, video or images) to any DLNA capable device on your network, this can include TVs, Blue-ray players, Smartphones, other computers, etc. Unlike other media servers like Plex or XBMC that focus more on the DLNA part and it does so greatly.

I personally run it on my home server sharing 1 TB of media to 3 TVs, 2 tablets, a few smartphones and it works flawlessly.

Install Serviio

You will need to make sure you have installed Java version 6 or greater on the system (you can do so using the command "java -version") and the ffmpeg package.

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You can download the Linux package from Serviio download page, you can use wget to do this and decompress it:

# wget http://download.serviio.org/releases/serviio-1.4.1.2-linux.tar.gz
# tar zxvf serviio-1.4.1.2-linux.tar.gz

Then I suggest renaming the folder and move it to a location you desire, I choose /usr/local/share/:

# mv serviio-1.4.1.2 serviio
# mv serviio /usr/local/share/

Making Serviio run at boot time

To make it run at boot time you will have to create a file in /etc/init/ named serviio.conf with the following content:

start on started networking
script
/usr/local/share/serviio/bin/serviio.sh
end script

And it will run the server during boot time.

You can also stop and start the service running the following commands:

sudo start serviio

and

sudo stop serviio

and check it's status with

initctl list | grep serviio

Sharing media with Serviio

Now you can run the console with the following command:

# /usr/local/share/serviio/bin/serviio-console.sh

In the first tab of the console you will see a list of devices on your network, while the Generic profile works well on most devices, since this application is focused on DLNA it has a number of profiles you can select, those profiles offer the best settings for that particular device.

For example the device with the IP address 192.168.1.201 is a Samsung TV, so I selected the appropriate Samsung TV profile for my model as you can see on the orange row:

Next go to the Library tab, here using the Add Local or Add path (for remote content) you can add content to share with other devices on your local network:

There are 5 check boxes on each line, the first 3 boxes identify the content as video, audio or photo files, the next is meta data (it tells the media server to download information about this media files from the internet, like thumbnails and movie information) and the next will tell Serviio to continue scanning that folder for updates.

Now you can access the service remotely, for example on my Samsung TV, when I press the Source button the DLNA servers will show like this:

From there you can access all the video, audio and photo files you shared, it will look something like this:

Serviio is a great service to have on your home network, it doesn't spend a lot of resources and it does the job of sharing media files flawlessly so uou can just enjoy the content on any of your devices.