Streaming video over the network from a Linux server (YouTube-esque)
 

Hey all! Is there any package that I can use to stream video over a LAN from my Linux server to, say, a web browser on client machine in a YouTube-esque type of way?
I have a server running Ubuntu Linux that's chock-full of anime that I'd like to share with my not so tech savy friends at school over the network. Currently I just have them logging into a Samba share and copying/playing the videos from there but most of the video files require certain codecs to be installed and I wanted a system that'd be a bit easier (for them). There's a variety of file types from AVIs to MPGs to MKVs most with subtitle tracks. I do know that any of the files I have would be playable by mplayer.
So, anybody know of a package like this or is this just a dream situation that won't work?

It's certainly possible. Something like this should achieve what you want: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/Lin...Streaming.html

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking, but I have been streaming video off my linux server for some time. I know that youtube streams their's in an flv format. When I stream mine I also have it in an flv format and it works fine. When using other formats it doesn't truly stream, rather it downloads the entire video to a tmp file then runs off that. Depending on the size of the file this can take some time.

I believe the secret to streaming video is the format you present it in. I take my videos in a number of different formats depending on the source, but I always convert them into flv to stream. A linux server can handle anything you wish to put out there, but it is the delay at the client end that determines whether the viewer is going to watch it to completion or give up on a long, slow presentation.

This is a presentation using flv off my home server running Ubuntu server. Marine Corps Tribute

As Lowell suggests, convert the video files to Flash video (.flv). You can use ffmppeg - http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ - to do that.

Than, have a look at JW FLV Player - http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player - which is a Flash movie player which you embed in a webpage for playback. So you'll need to run a webserver (like Apache) on your Linux box.

Then, if you also have support for a scripting language like PHP or perl on your server, you can code some dynamic pages for your video library.

Your user's will only need to have the Flash plugin installed, which (chances are) they have already.

That's one approach; there are probably many others :)

Awesome, sleddog! Thanks for the suggestion! I'll definitely check that link out and the others above. However, I do get the feeling that if I really wanted this to work, I'd have to convert all my stuff to flv (and loose a lot of quality) which I really do NOT want to do.
I'm thinking that I'll just have to be happy with having people remotely log into the Samba share and remotely playing the files.
(BTW, I'm running an Ubuntu LAMP server so it has all that jazz like Apache, and PHP.)

You won't necessarily lose a lot of quality, it depends on the parameters you set when doing the conversion. The video bitrate has probably the greatest impact on quality. As you'll be serving your video over a local network, as opposed to the Web, you can set a high bitrate and retain a lot of quality.

Cool, yeah. I tried out the player and it works really well. I ended up working on it for a few hours last nigh and set up an audio stream with a playlist working off of an example that they had on the site. You can check out what I did here
EDIT: http://216.86.84.3/mp/music/SuperGreenX/ Unfortunately, not all of the features of the example followed over into my actual implementation. I'll have to see what went wrong, then.
I'll probably be adding a lot of my other free (as in speech and beer) music to the site and try and create some sort of navigation system.
Even though I'll be serving this over a local network, my campus's network supremely SUCKS so when I was streaming videos before (through the Samba share) people were commenting that there was a lot of lag. Hmmm... actually, maybe if I reduced the bitrate people would get better playback!

NEW QUESTION: Do you know of any conversion program were you can choose different audio tracks and that will also include subtitles in the final video? (Most of the videos that I want to server are Japanese style cartoons called "anime").

Once again, thanks for the suggestion! I'm really enjoying the software!

OK, try VLC - it *may* have something to stream videos right inside it, but can't you just make a simple webpage in Nvu or somthing that has your videos in it? If you have Apache etc then it'll just play...?
I just saw something in Dynebolic called Ksubtitle, maybe that's what youre looking for?

VLC? No, no... I'm running a SERVER which means that there is no graphical interface to it and, as far as I know, VLC does not have a command line only interface.
I will try checking out Nvu and Dynebolic, though. Thanks!

Clearly, you have not actually checked out VLC. They had a server software VLS that allowed you to set up some streams, but you had the command line ability in previous versions of VLC and you can stream and setup VOD (Video on Demand) currently.
There is a web management service that runs also. So you can set up your play lists and allow others to stream from it. The rest of the management of the server is set up through telnet commands. You should really check it out.

But other than that I recommend using the FLV conversion, or running a http server and using php and a script like from http://phpmotion.com/

flash and flv support h.264+aac so you can have very high quality video/audio for your streaming. Most sites just use really low bit rates to decrease the bandwidth used per stream.