i want to watch and listen to my media collection from my android phone.
the media resides on my kitchenserver, and the "streaming" to my desktop in the livingroom works perfectly via sshfs.
streaming to my android phone isn't so easy.
the hardware and the bandwidth are well capable of doing this (e.g. youtube videos or manually copied movies).
after some research i started using file managers that have sftp capabilities, but the amount of dropouts & hangups is too high.
i'm not exactly sure why this happens.
i'm using mobile broadband only for this.
i think using a dedicated media server on my debian server and a client for the phone, should help things go smoothly.
both should be FOSS (or at least close to it).
i haven't yet tried anything; the amount of different more or less specialised apps and servers is overwhealming.
what's the way to go?

what, nothing?

i've been looking around and it seems that linux FOSS media servers pretty much boils down to ampache and xmbc.
there seems to be no problem on the server side (but are they good with mobile broadband connections?).

the much bigger choice, confusion and commercialism seems to be happening on the android client side.

i did try ampache meanwhile; at least with music all is fine, there's a few free clients on f-droid, e.g. this one.
leaves the video.
it looks like this should be possible with ampache, too, but a different client.
fortunately ampache seems to be able to use other transfer protocols, so i could e.g. use a subsonic client.

or should i try/use something else?

So that I can watch video from my Pi on my iPhad I simply set up Apache and watch movies over HTTP as a simpler solution to a media server as when I've looked into them the setup looks too involved to bother with for the few occasions I want to watch on my iPhad.

i'm well underway with ampache now.

in case someone wants to go there:
don't use the debian repos. they're too old.
i think the easiest is to download this (*) and install it manually like you would install a CMS, following these instructions.
dependencies for debian are here (but one of the devs warned me not to use the ampache-debian repo!).

i should now be able to access both music and video on my android phone, using a subsonic client.

whether all this actually improves my situation, we'll see.


(*) i cloned the normal github repo and had to install composer to install other dependencies. the web UI is really quite bloated now, with bootsrap and ajax and whatnot, but i'm not planning on using it anyway...
still, functionality is much better now.

it is as i suspected; using a dedicated media server/client has smoothed things perfectly, i can watch movies and tv shows, even listen to .flac audio without transcoding it first!

i recap:

download and install ampache, git version (see previous post) to your server
on your android device: install DSub (supports both audio and video playback)
on your ampache install, activate the subsonic api (preferably by creating a dedicated user, plus some additional setup, see here


however, not all is rosy.
it seems that some media codecs aren't suitable for streaming, and i cannot stream all movies to my phone, even though they play nicely when i copy them to the sd card first.
there is a "transcode on the fly" option in ampache.
it works nicely with music, but not with video; i am still researching this, i think it's fixable.
maybe i'll need a stronger server...

so, to cut it short, can someone help with a nice avconv/ffmpeg oneliner that will transcode video/audio to a format suitable for streaming to android phones?