Videos from a distance

I went to watch a film I had downloaded onto an external drive connected to my older laptop.
Normally I plug that drive straight into the television, but this time I could not eject it, since it was being used by other programs.
So I found myself with two options: watch the film on the 14" screen or find a way to stream the video to my new laptop, which has an HDMI output, and enjoy all the sound and picture quality LG™ provides.

Like a good film-loving computer person (I am not), I picked the second option, and I am going to write here about how I solved the problem at the time, as well as other methods I found later.

1. Put the computers on a network

I did not have a router to set up a network. Since both laptops have wireless cards, I created an Ad-Hoc network, as explained in this post (without the internet part).

2. Find some way to exchange files

There are several ways to send packets from one computer to another on the network:

1. SSH

   SSH was the first thing that came to mind, since I am used to it. I admit it is not a very good solution, since it uses a lot of CPU and increases network traffic for no reason (there is no point in using encryption unless you are paranoid or the video is extremely secret). In any case, it worked well like this:

   1. Install and enable SSH on both computers:

      sudo pacman -S openssh
      sudo /etc/rc.d/sshd start
      

   2. Connect Computer2 to Computer1 over ssh:

      ssh julio@192.168.1.1
      

   3. Play the video

      mplayer video.avi -display :0
      

      or

      export DISPLAY=:0
      

      in case we need to use some other program that has no command for changing the display.

2. SSH with a pipe

   Like the previous way, but piping the video straight into mplayer

   ssh julio@192.168.1.2 "cat /media/externo/Videos/video.avi" | mplayer -cache 65536 -
   

3. SSHFS

   1. Install sshfs

      sudo pacman -S sshfs
      

   2. Mount the file system

      sshfs julio@192.168.1.2:/media/externo /media/externo
      

   3. Go to the folder and play the video with mplayer as if it were a local file.

      mplayer /media/externo/Videos/video.avi
      

4. SSH with X11

   1. On the server, change the file /etc/ssh/sshd_conf from

      #X11forwarding no
      

      to

      X11Forwarding yes
      

      or, on the client, edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config from #ForwardX11 no to ForwardX11 yes.

   2. Play the video with mplayer

   ssh -XY julio@192.168.1.2 mplayer /media/externo/Videos/video.avi
   

5. Samba

   1. Download Samba

   2. Enable sharing of your videos folder

      #  vim /etc/samba/smb.conf
      [videos]
         comment = Videos do Julio
         path = /media/externo/Videos
         writable = no
         valid users = julio
         follow symlinks = yes
         wide links = yes
      

   3. Mount the file system

      sudo mount -t cifs //192.168.0.1/Videos /media/externo/Videos -o user=julio,password=PASSWORD,workgroup=WORKGROUP
      

   4. Play the video with mplayer as if it were a local file

      mplayer /media/externo/Videos/video.avi
      

6. Netcat

   • On the computer with the video:

     cat /media/externo/Videos/video.avi | nc -l -p 9998
     

   • On the computer connected to the TV:

     nc 192.168.0.1 9998 | mplayer -vo x11 -cache 3000 -
     

7. VLC with sftp

   file » Open Network…

   sftp://julio@10.211.55.3/media/externo/Videos/video.avi

   Enter the login and the password

3. Converting

On my home network I managed to stream 720p video without trouble, even with my old computer on old wi-fi (802.11g). But if you want to do the same with 1080p video, or even stream over the internet, it can be worth converting the video in real time. You can use ffmpeg for that.

Preventing standby

To keep the monitor of the computer connected to the television from turning off automatically after inactivity, we can disable standby through Xorg:

sudo vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And leave the ServerLayout section like the example below:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier                  "Layout"
        Screen      0               "Screen0"
        Option      "Xinerama"      "true"
        Option      "BlankTime"     "0"
        Option      "StandbyTime"   "0"
        Option      "SuspendTime"   "0"
        Option      "OffTime"       "0"
EndSection

Links

• http://youtu.be/n4Ul_A0VBVI