Is there really no decent way to access a UPnP media server on Linux? (midwest.social)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by klisurovi4@midwest.social to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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Here's my situation. I have an Asus router that allows me to connect an external drive to it and then it can function as a UPnP media server. Back when I was on Windows It worked perfectly. It always sat in the sidebar of the file explorer and I could just drag and drop files to and from it, download stuff directly onto it or play movies just by double clicking them

I moved to a Fedora-based distro (Nobara) a few months ago and have been unable to access the server the same way. I know it works, because if I open VLC I can access it under "Universal Plug'n'Play" and see my movies, but for the life of me I can't get it to show up in Dolphin or any other file explorer I've tried. I've resorted to turning on FTP on the router and mounting the drive with rclone, which somewhat works for my use case, but it's slow and occasionally just refuses to connect because sessions don't seem to get closed properly and I get a "Too many connections" error.

My google-fu appears to have failed me, because I have genuinely found nothing, besides just using Kodi or VLC. I also found a few threats from like a decade ago complaining about the UPnP support on KDE, but I would have expected things to have improved since then. Is what I'm trying to achieve here just not possible?

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[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 6 points 1 month ago

Not a solution to your exact problem, but when you are connected to a remote server via Dolphin you can right click anywhere in the file view and select "Add to places" (exact wording might be different) to create a shortcut.

That way I have easy access to several different drives. Webdav for my Nextcloud server, sshfs for most of the Linux machines in the house. And when we still had Windows PCs I'd access those via Samba. FTP is possible as well.

But yeah, UPNP is not aa universal as one might hope. Every time I try it with something it's buggy even on devices that supposedly support it fully. So I usually end up creating alternative access methods, like you did.

[-] klisurovi4@midwest.social 2 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, as I said I currently access the server via FTP. I was just hoping there would be a better way to do it, because, while working, this isn't as reliable as I'd like it to be.

this post was submitted on 01 May 2026

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