Watching video on a LAN

[James Henstridge]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:35 PM, Donn <donn.ingle at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yo,
> We have a small network at home. At the moment I watch vids on a notebook* via
> Firefox which is being served by a web-server on the main machine.
>
> * Ubuntu Netbook Remix Jaunty is installed.
>
> This leaves the video playing up to Firefox and it's various (confusing)
> plugins. Some videos work, many do not (in divers exotic ways.)
> Also, FF tends to crash -- prob. the plugin's fault. I don't care, it's still
> a mess.
>
> When I copy and paste the URL into VLC player -- the results are much better.
> Videos tend to play well.
>
> The manual process of finding the link in Firefox, copy, switch to VLC, open a
> menu, paste the URL is too tedious. (Not to mention too complex for others in
> the family!)
>
> Is there any other means to browse a restricted location on another machine,
> click a video link and have VLC (or other) player open and *stream* that
> video?
>
> (I don't want to copy the video across before it plays. It must stream.)
>
> I am having horrible thoughts of trying to write some solution in Python --
> but before I start coding and lose sight of the next six months, I thought I'd
> ask here :)

The solution to this problem that the consumer electronics industry is
pushing is DLNA (www.dlna.org), which is essentially the UPNP AV Media
Server specification with some restrictions and extensions.  You can
find DLNA player implementations in some new TVs and game consoles,
and server implementations in some home NAS boxes, so this can broaden
the number of devices you'll be able to stream to.

For playback on Ubuntu systems, there is a Totem plugin that can speak
the protocol in the totem-plugins-extra package.  It appears as
"Coherence  DLNA/UPnP Client" in the user interface and adds an extra
side bar that lets you browse the files available on the media servers
it discovers on the network.

I haven't looked in VLC, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some
support for the protocol there.

On the server side, there are a number of choices available:
 * MediaTomb
 * ushare
 * Fuppes
 * Rygel
 * ps3mediaserver

Of these, the first two are packaged in Ubuntu so might be worth
checking out first.  The version of MediaTomb in Ubuntu should be fine
for streaming to Totem, but has some problems streaming to devices
like the PlayStation 3 -- for those you're better off with a
Subversion snapshot.

Rygel is probably worth watching over the next year, as it is aiming
for good integration with GNOME by offering a simple D-Bus interface
to let other applications publish content.  The latest version of
PulseAudio can use this to publish live audio streams, for example.

James.