Info Limit media type accessible to users of Media Server DLNA/UPnP

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Info Limit media type accessible to users of Media Server DLNA/UPnP

fredbert

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The Indexing Service controls which folders on the NAS are considered as fully accessible for various packages. Most of these packages have their own access controls to ensure that users don't have access to inappropriate media, e.g. Video Station supports age classification for each user (if you enable this).

The problem with Media Server is that it doesn't have any of these controls, it serves up unfiltered access to any device that is allowed to access the DLNA/UPnP service. I've played with Logitech Media Server and Plex DLNA service to see if I can provide DLNA/UPnP access to the music library, may be photos (we don't have many in the shared libraries), but block access to videos. We don't have anything contentious but we still want to apply age-related control to TV and films.

We have media players that support accessing DLNA for music libraries but the associated mobile apps are the device MAC that the DLNA server browsing the service. This means that I can't use Media Server's device blocking to control access to the music library, if we want to use our own mobile devices. Unfortunately there are other ways to access the rest of the Media Server media ... e.g. VLC player and the PVR connected to the TV.

Within Video Station and Plex (yes @Telos I've finally got it working, with a Pass) I've got TV and films classified and users assigned a set of accessible ratings. So we don't need to use DLNA for video: official apps do this without it.

The solution I've arrived at is this:
  • Plex's DLNA service is not required.
  • LMS is not required.
  • No firewall rules in DSM are needed to control access ... all local devices need to access Media Server.
  • In Indexing Service (Control Panel) make sure that for each media type that you want to block all access to has at least one folder, or sub-folder, that will always be empty
  • In Media Server
    • allow all device to connect
    • for DMA Menu Style select one of the custom styles and edit it, as follows
    • for the media type you want to block access you must have only one rule/filter: set the rule to apply only to empty folder and save it.

Now if I access the Video group it shows me the one rule/filter and then says there's nothing available. There's no other DLNA way to access the rest of Indexing Service's video folders.

Another benefit to using a custom DMA Menu Style is that you can create the views that are most useful to you. Plus I found that the '(with index)' attributes always produced empty lists, so I fixed this by replacing with the equivalent attributes without index.
 

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