VLC in linux desktop not discovering dlna server

[mcloaked]

Recently I created a small SoC based minidlna video server running in archlinuxarm on a rock64, which shows up without issues in android phones and a smart TV on the LAN where the minidlna server is running. However on all laptops and desktops on the same LAN VLC running in a plasma desktop on arch linux machines fails to discover the minidlna server (with no firewall running), whereas when I used to run a similar system a couple of years ago, V:C on linux desktops worked perfectly discovering a local dlna server. I recently found that there was a code change in QT5 for defined connections that was changed with no backward compatibility, and I wonder if that change may be underlying the dlna discovery failure in recent versions of vlc? The link I found was https://stackoverflow.com/questions/622 ... e-deprecat and I am running the following versions of vlc and QT5:

vlc 3.0.16-3

KDE Plasma Version: 5.22.4-1
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.84.0-1
Qt Version: 5.15.2+kde+r211-1

This problem manifested itself with the laptop running connected to the LAN via wireless.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Qt is not involved in DLNA. Best guess is that you've "updated" to a broken (or incompatible) version of libupnp.

[mcloaked]

I have ibupnp 1.14.7-1 but I don't know if there is a known bug with that package

[mcloaked]

A user replied to the thread on this topic on the arch linux forum at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 4#p1986754

[mcloaked]

I downgraded to libupnp 1.14.0-1 but it made no difference - earlier versions won't install due to other dependencies in the fully updated system.

[mcloaked]

Copying the suggested url for the server based on the comment at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 7#p1986797 within vlc to open a network stream allowed me to play videos on the server with no problem within vlc. So vlc can indeed access the stream from the server, but it is upnp discovery that is failing - so there is either a bug in vlc or in libupnp.

[mcloaked]

I have found the solution to this issue, which was due to my not understanding how to stop the firewall on my vlc client machine. The problem was that the nftables firewall did not flush the firewall rules when the nftables service was stopped. So the firewall was blocking required ports and multicast packets for the vlc client. A recent change to nft meant that previous behaviour that stopping the nftables firewall service would flush the ruleset was changed, and it is now necessary to manually flush the ruleset for the firewall. Once the nft rules are flushed vlc works perfectly. So this is resolved.