Reassess media file size in mplayer

Question

I have two computers on the same wireless network (same subnet). Lets call them computer-A and computer-B. All my media files are on computer-B. I want to be able to play the file on computer-A using mplayer. To do this, I do the following:

ssh myuser@computer-B "cat my_media_file.mkv" | mplayer -

Which allows me to "stream" the my_media_file.mkv on computer-A from computer-B. But this streaming doesn't allow me to seek stream so instead, I do this in a terminal:

ssh myuser@computer-B "cat my_media_file.mkv" > temp_media_file

And then in another terminal, I do this:

mplayer temp_media_file

which then allows me to seek the file too.

But the problem is this: lets say 10MB were written to temp_media_file when I started playing the file in another terminal; then although the file size is increasing, mplayer doesn't recalculate the file size or something like that only plays the first 10MB.

So is there way to make mplayer reassess the file when I start playing?

If anyone has an alternate solution to allow me to stream and seek, then please let me know...

Answer 1

This can be easily done using fuse and sshfs. sshfs mounts remote file system locally using ssh as communication channel.

You can do this on computer-A

x@x:/tmp$ mkdir test

x@x:/tmp$ sshfs x@[computer-b-ip-addr]:/ test

You can access filesystem of computer B in folder "test".