How to Stream Videos from a Raspberry Pi to a Smart TV

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2016-02-22

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Summary:

Install and configure minidlna on your Raspberry Pi and make sure it's on the same network as your Smart TV. Your TV's media playing application should see the Pi on the network and let you browse and play videos on the Pi.

More In-Depth Guide

First you need to install minidlna on your Raspberry Pi:

sudo apt-get install minidlna

minidlna's configuration file is located at /etc/minidlna. We want to edit this to point to our video files:

sudo nano /etc/minidlna

Around line 25, your media folder is set:

media_dir=/var/lib/minidlna

You can either change that to something like

media_dir=/home/username/videos

or link your video folder there with this command:

sudo ln -s /home/username/videos /var/lib/minidlna

Finally, restart the minidlna service:

sudo service minidlna restart

Now you're Smart TV's media application should be able to find your Pi if they are on the same network.

Check out more posts about the Raspberry Pi here: Raspberry Pi Posts