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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[-] ISO@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 weeks ago

I searched for "upnp fuse" and found a project called "djmount". The code is ancient (last updated 20 years ago), but it may still work (AUR package uploaded in 2023).

If if it indeed works, then you can just mount your shares, and access them system-wide, from any file manager or utility.

[-] klisurovi4@midwest.social 1 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, I found it too at one point. Ancient is an understatement lol. I gave up trying to make it work after a few hours. It's honestly crazy that nobody has made another utility like it

[-] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 2 points 4 weeks ago

If the AUR package works and nobody commented otherwise you might want to take another look, esp. at the PKGBUILD which can help you build it on other distros, too.

Or just install it from your distro's repos?

How old is your router?

[-] ISO@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 weeks ago

@klisurovi4@midwest.social

I tested building from the source repo the AUR PKGBUILD uses. Vendored libupnp needed -Wno-incompatible-pointer-types to build with modern GCC. Otherwise, the build succeeded without a problem (see the end of this comment).

I also tested the executable itself, and it seems to work too, although the tool doesn't expose an option to pick the device to listen to, which may not work for users with multiple active network interfaces, if the wrong one is picked.

Here is the executable if you don't mind running binaries from a random person on the internet 😉. libfuse.so.2 should be the only non-system dependency.

git clone https://github.com/amiri82/djmount
cd djmount
# apply the diff below, then
./bootstrap
./configure
make
# the executable should be at djmount/djmount

 libupnp/configure.ac | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/libupnp/configure.ac b/libupnp/configure.ac
index 8c073e7..889ed9f 100644
***
a/libupnp/configure.ac
+++ b/libupnp/configure.ac
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ RT_BOOL_ARG_ENABLE([tools], [yes], [helper APIs in upnptools.h])
 #
 # Checks for programs
 #
-CFLAGS="-fcommon"
+CFLAGS="-fcommon -Wno-incompatible-pointer-types"
 AC_PROG_CC
 AM_PROG_CC_C_O
 AM_PROG_AR

this post was submitted on 01 May 2026

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