Tweaking Minidlna Media Server on AsusWRT Merlin

You’re running AsusWRT Merlin and have some trouble with minidlna, e.g. bad media indexing performance or broken media databases ?

This can be caused by using an USB Stick as media database storage! Internally, minidlna is using an SQLite database to store the media file index – and sometime this database may broke (slow, unsynced file operations, user terminated processes).

As a workaround, it’s possible to move the media database to the temporary filesystem (ramdisk). As a disadvantage, on every system shutdown (reboot/power cycle) the database will be destroyed. But it only takes a view minutes to recreate it, because the ramdisk storage is a lot faster than the attached USB drive!

Just create an additional user config file in your JFFS /jffs/configs/minidlna.conf.add (will be automatically appended to the system generated minidlna.conf file!)

# Move the database to the tmp directory (ramdisk, will be recreated on reboot !!)
db_dir=/tmp/.minidlna

# create a custom minidlna logfile
log_dir=/var/log

# disable album art indexing
album_art_names=NO_ALBUM_ARTS.x