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how to easily create a stream that could be seen on a terminal?

As a network experiment, I'd like to be able to stream some content to people that connected to a certain port of my computer, as if it were aa or caca output.

I know it's possible to use mplayer to be able to see video on the terminal of the local computer and so I thought that it shouldn't be too difficult to try to stream it into the network.

How can that be easily achieved?

Thanks in advance.

Try using netcat (nc)?

On server side (sending out the stream)

Code:

nc -l portnumber

on client side (recieving stream)

Code:

nc ip-addr portnumber

with mplayer

Code:

nc ip-addr portnumber | mplayer -

This will only work on a 1:1 basis rather then 1:multi.
You'll need something like icecast for that which is more "suited" but increases in complexity.

I thought of netcat but I would have to feed it the multimedia stream.... and my question was pointed more or less in that direction. Say, something along the lines of:

Code:

multimedia-encoder --whatever-options-to-produce-the-stream-content sourcefile.avi | nc -l 4567

And then someone be able to see the content by doing this:

Code:

telnet ip-address 4567

But then it would only work for the first client that connects, right? How about producing content for anyone that connects?

Quote:

But then it would only work for the first client that connects, right? How about producing content for anyone that connects?

Then it'd have to create a new connection for that user.

Use something designed for broadcasting media to multiple users

http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Icecast2

This example would not work

Code:

multimedia-encoder --whatever-options-to-produce-the-stream-content sourcefile.avi | nc -l 4567

You can't both save and pipe the file. Since it is being saved as sourcefile.avi, nothing is sent to stdout and nc has nothing to send to a user.
IF you want to both save a file and send it out, tee does this.

Code:

multimedia-encoder --whatever-options-to-produce-the-stream-content - | tee sourcefile.avi | nc -l 4567

This would cause the output to be saved as sourcefile.avi and piped to nc.
This can have unexpected consequences if the multimedia-encoder depends on the file extension to determine how to encode it (like ffmpeg/avconv) which can be overridden by manually defining the format.

I understand what you mean.... but actually, in my example, sourcefile.avi is what you would like to stream out.

I suggest experimenting. A common method of outputting a file into a program is with cat.

Code:

cat file | program

You can try it with just cat file too and see what happens.
(Ctrl + c will cancel any output the cat command does)