Minidlna fails to read external directory

Question

I have an exfat formatted drive attached to my raspberry pi and I want to add a folder from that disk to minidlna but I cannot. It works fine with the internal shared folder.

This is service status output:

systemctl status minidlna

* minidlna.service - MiniDLNA lightweight DLNA/UPnP-AV server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/minidlna.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2021-07-26 16:06:49 EDT; 6s ago
     Docs: man:minidlnad(1)
           man:minidlna.conf(5)
  Process: 687 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/minidlnad -f $CONFIGFILE -P /run/minidlna/minidlna.pid $DAEMON_OPTS (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 688 (code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION)

Jul 26 16:06:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Starting MiniDLNA lightweight DLNA/UPnP-AV server...
Jul 26 16:06:49 raspberrypi minidlnad[687]: [2021/07/26 16:06:49] minidlna.c:631: error: Media directory "/media/pi/SSD/shared" not accessible [Permission Denied]
Jul 26 16:06:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: minidlna.service: Failed to parse PID from file /run/minidlna/minidlna.pid: Invalid argument
Jul 26 16:06:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Started MiniDLNA lightweight DLNA/UPnP-AV server.
Jul 26 16:06:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: minidlna.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION
Jul 26 16:06:49 raspberrypi systemd[1]: minidlna.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

This is how the drive mounted:

/dev/sda2 on /media/pi/SSD type exfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,iocharset=utf8,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2)

It says it's mounted read-only but I can modify anything on it.

And here is the output for ls -l /media/pi:

ls -l /media/pi
total 128
drwxr-xr-x 6 pi pi 131072 Jul 26 15:54 SSD

In /etc/minidlna.conf I set user=pi.

Answer 1

To see if this is indeed a problem with access rights I have changed the ownership of all files on the mounted drive to root.root and set 777 as access mask. Also I have allowed access to the minidlna group in the ACL (Shared Folders). So it is definitely an ownership or access rights issue in my case. I have not yet got to the exact part that causes problem but believe it may lay in the way the permissions are set on the mount point.