minidlnad hangs on one specific file

[Andriy Golovnya]

I have two server serving as upnp and samba storages in my network. After update to 14.04 I got both minidlnad's on both servers hanging on the same specific file.

root@server:~# ps ax | grep minidlna
 4536 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/minidlnad -f /etc/minidlna.conf -P /run/minidlna/minidlna.pid
 4541 ? RN 92:20 /usr/bin/minidlnad -f /etc/minidlna.conf -P /run/minidlna/minidlna.pid
 8814 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep --color=auto minidlna
root@server:~# ls -l /proc/4541/fd
total 0
lrwx------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 0 -> /dev/null
lrwx------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 1 -> /dev/null
lrwx------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 2 -> /dev/null
l-wx------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 3 -> /var/log/minidlna.log
lrwx------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 4 -> /var/cache/minidlna/files.db
lrwx------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 5 -> /var/cache/minidlna/files.db
lr-x------ 1 minidlna minidlna 64 Jun 4 10:32 6 -> /***/share/Public/Movie/***/***.mkv

Same behavior on both servers and one the same file. In this state minidlnad consumes 100% of one CPU core.
If required I can upload the mkv-file somewhere.

PS: The very important disadvantage of this bug is that scan is never complete.

[alea (olivier-garet-p)]

Same problem here with minidlna 1.1.2 (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) and minidlna 1.1.4 (last one compiled from source)

Applying Andriy's procedure (thanks to him !), I found the file which hanged. Removing the file and restarting minidlna, it gets fine.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Florian W. (florian-will)]

It might be interesting to know if this happens when minidlna is linked against ffmpeg instead of libav. Some people say that libav has more bugs (some even say it's "broken"), so maybe this is one of those bugs. It should be possible to remove libav and install ffmpeg on newer Ubuntu releases, then compile minidlna manually.

libav seems like it's used in Ubuntu/Debian mostly for political reasons.

Alternatively, another distribution like Arch Linux can be used to test if the file works there with minidlna+ffmpeg. I don't have a buggy mkv file, so I can't do that. I do have an Arch Linux setup available though.