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I have a Linux file server at home, and I'd like to watch video stored on it on my desktop.
A very simple solution comes very close: use any old HTTP server to serve up the files, and view them in the browser or any other media player.
The problem is, the videos are too high quality for my WiFi speed. Constant pauses.
There are a couple easy but lame fixes: 1) use Ethernet, yeah, yeah; 2) Copy all the files over beforehand; 3) Transcode all the video to a lower quality, but then I have to store maybe 175% as much data, and I'm unlikely to find the sweet spot where I'm just barely under my network's capacity.
Conceptually the solution is simple: transcode on the fly. But I haven't found a solution that really works. I'd like it to be really On-Demand (i.e., I don't have to interact with the server at the time of playing the video), and ideally adapt the bitrate to the connection speed, but even if I have to adjust a knob on the server it'd be better than reencoding over and over.
Anyone know if this is possible?