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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[-] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

My google-fu appears to have failed me, because I have genuinely found nothing

This is strange. My search for "fedora upnp" returns plenty of possibilities. "linux upnp filesystem integration" as well.

Apparently simple service discovery protocol is another important keyword.

I don't use this myself...

[-] klisurovi4@midwest.social 3 points 1 month ago

I guess I didn't really phrase myself correctly. I found a bunch of stuff but nothing that really helps. Most of the threads were either ancient or not related to my use case. I found one promising utility (djmount) but it was last updated like 2005 and I had no luck getting it to run on my pc.

That being said, I didn't think of searching for service discovery protocols

this post was submitted on 01 May 2026

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