A few weeks back I thought it'd be pretty sweet to setup a media station that would serve audio and video.  The idea would be to rip DVD's and CD's and then have them play on demand.

So I took a look at VideoLan's VLS open source stuff.  Looked really sweet.  You could essentially stream the video from the source computer, to the destination, WHILE having a web interface that would allow you to control the files that were being played from another computer, like a laptop (A handy remote control device).  It took me about 5 hours to get this all going.  Mainly because I'm a noob, but also because it seems that all Open Source projects have limited documentation.

Once I got it going I could stream 1 file, but I would have to select the entire video OR audio directory from the server box, and then have it open the "Web Interface".  Once that was completed I had to leave the Video Lan server open, otherwise...it would lose those settings and I'd have to do it again.  I still plunged forward.  My family was getting restless, wanting to watch a new movie, but I held on.

I thought I could just create a VLC playlist and then just open that up on my server box and then go back to my web interface and stream it up.  Nope.  You have to individually select files, so my handy playlist idea is out the window.  Finally I just put a few files in the existing playlist so we could get some stuff going.

I went back and started playing the stream in VLC's client and the screen went green.  Certain websites said that it was a driver corruption, others stated other problems.  I finally got something to play without the green screen though and sat down...

The movie started to choke.  It would pause every few seconds as if I was viewing the sucker through the web.  I grabbed a really long CAT5 cable and started to string it furiously from one room to the other and plugged it into both computers.  This was a 100MBit line I was now on so I thought I had this squashed.  As soon as the first pause came...I gave in.

After 7 hours, I went into the server machine and shared the directory through explorer.  I then went back to my machine and typed in the IP address, saw the shared files, double clicked on the movie and it opened up in WMP.  No pauses, no green screen, and we watched our movie.  Setup time for the uncool method: Less than 5 minutes.

Yeah, I gotta walk up to the machine to start and stop files (been thinking about that FireFly remote though).  And yeah, I will not join the elite squad of dorks and geeks that are multicasting their collections through web interfaces that come up in their PocketPC's to remotely administer media while doing it on demand from a server.  But what I will do is enjoy my media trouble free through a simple and boring way to deliver it.