video streaming -- recommendations?

[Walter Dnes]

On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 02:11:20PM -0400, Peter King wrote
> I'd like to be able to stream video from a Linux box to several
> different kinds of recipients: laptops running OSX, tablets running
> Android, other computers running Linux. I already use calibre-server
> and mpd to serve up ebooks and music respectively, and was wondering
> if there were anything I could use for video.  Command-line is
> preferable but not required; remote control would be convenient.
> 
> Google reveals a lot of very heavy solutions: "media servers" such
> as MythTV, MediaTomb, and so on, but they seem to be much more than I
> need. I'd be happy if mplayer2 were to run as a daemon, for instance,
> but I can't see that it does.

  If you want simple, howsabout...

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

...which starts up a server on port 8000 of your machine?  You should do
it in a chroot if you want to "contain" the people viewing the files.
They should be running mplayer/vlc/whatever to view the files.  Don't
try "streaming" them yourself.

  As a regular user, you can specify a port >=1024 like so...

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080

...to serve on port 8080.

  See http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/tech-tip-really-simple-http-server-python
for more details.  Note that you need root permissions to serve on ports
<1024.  See
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2699907/dropping-root-permissions-in-python
for instructions how to drop root privileges in python, once the server
is launched.  Again, I recommend a chroot.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications
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