Video Streaming from Linux (Shallow Thoughts)

Video Streaming from Linux

As part of a set-top video project, I looked into streaming. Just local streaming: we have a fileserver in one part of the house, running Linux, and the set-top box by the TV (also running Linux though that part is less important); how can I stream a video from the fileserver and play it using mpv on the set-top box?

I thought that would be a dead simple question to answer. But there's surprisingly little related to that that shows up in Google's increasingly broken web search, and what I found in the actual documentation for various programs I tried didn't work.

TL;DR It turns out I probably won't be using this, because it's actually much easier just to mount the fileserver's video directory with sshfs and pretend the video files are local files. Still, I'd been curious about how to do video streaming, and I did find several ways to do it. So here's what I learned.

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