How do I stream video on a LAN (rather than copy and play)?

fastback69 · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 23

I have a small home LAN with a fileserver I store most of my media on.
When I choose music to play from my fileserver across my LAN - it plays (streams) fine. Audacious and XMMS both work fine.

When I select a XVID file to play (once again located on the fileserver), it starts copying the file I want to play to my local /home directory first, then starts playing the file once it has finished copying to /home.
Xine and Mplayer both have this behavior (copy then play, rather than streaming the video...)

Am I missing a USE flag that I should have had installed prior to compiling Xine or Mplayer that would allow for this?

I'm sure it can be done quite easily but I have yet to find a post on how to fix the problem.

Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

thestick · Guru Joined: 07 Apr 2006 Posts: 531 Location: /dev/urandom

you could try mplayer .
i now it has a -cache option

fastback69 · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 23

I'll look into the -cache option when using mplayer -

I use Xine for nearly all files that are not wmv - is it possible to 'stream' using Xine?

BlackEdder · Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 8:22 pm Post subject:

Vlc is pretty good for this
http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch02.html

Although the copy behaviour seems very odd for me, how do you share the files from your server.

fastback69 · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 23

My media files are stored on an external USB drive hanging off of a Windows 2003 Server PC.
The USB drive is shared with full guest R/W access.

Maybe it could be a permissions issue on the 2003 server side of things?

I've verified that I can read/write/delete from this share from my Gentoo PC - Hmmmm....

BlackEdder · Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 9:51 pm Post subject:

Do you play the files directly from the commandline (mplayer file) or do you do it by double clicking in nautilus/konquerer??

fastback69 · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2006 Posts: 23

I will usually play the file (try to play the file) by double clicking on it in an open window, or select the file from within Xine.
I have not tried via command line yet -

Would this matter or is it just a way to narrow down what could be happeing that's preventing the streaming playback I'm looking for?

BlackEdder · Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 10:16 pm Post subject:

I thought it might be some weird behaviour from your filemanager, so to completely rule that out you could try it from the command line. Although if you select from within xine then that also proofs that it is not the filemanager.

If it is not the filemanager then I have no idea what could cause this. I sometimes share files over fuse-ssh between linux machines and never saw such behaviour (especially the difference between video files and music files is weird).