Is there any easy way to locally stream media files over a network (to other Ubuntu machines)? I tried using ssh, but that's too slow for anything, and I can't figure out anything that would allow me to stream any video fast enough.
I use lighttpd to make media accessible via HTTP, which is unencrypted (and therefore relatively fast), allows access control and is quite usable for streaming, although often underestimated for this purpose.
This is my lighttpd setup:
server.modules = (
"mod_access",
"mod_alias",
"mod_compress",
"mod_redirect",
"mod_auth",
"mod_cgi"
)
cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "" )
server.port = 8001
server.document-root = "/home/shared/htvideo"
server.errorlog = "/dev/stdout"
server.dir-listing = "enable"
dir-listing.encoding = "utf-8"
index-file.names = ( "index.cgi", "index.html")
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
This brings up a small HTTP server on port 8001 which delivers content from /home/shared/htvideo. I got some self-written CGI scripts, to manage them, hence the CGI part in the configuration. But you can ignore that.
I use this to watch videos on my Android tablet without downloading them.
Whoops, you still need to start the service ;-)
Put this stuff into a configuration file (like .video_service), and run lighttpd -f .video_service.
After starting up the service tell your friends to point a browser to http://your.computers.ip.address:8001. They will see the list of files and can open each link directly with VLC media player, or totem or mplayer, Windows Media Player, or whatever. Most browsers even support to play MP4 videos (and sometimes other formats) by themselves nowadays.
