[MPlayer-users] mplayer -ao nas ?

[Frederick Bruckman]

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Peter Lemken wrote:

> Within my local network I would like to log onto another server via ssh -X
> and watch a video from that server.

It'll be inefficient enough without any opportunity to use shared
memory, but encrypting the stream will really kill it, so I would
forget about using "-X" with ssh, and simply set DISPLAY, in your
environment, to the host you're sitting in front of (the X server).
If the two hosts share a home directory, that'll just work; if not,
you can push the XDMCP keys around like so:

 xauth nextract - $(hostname):0 | ssh otherhost xauth nmerge -

If you have trouble with all that, you can alway use "xhost
+otherhost" on the X server host. (Of course you have a firewall?)

> man nas is not very helpful, neither is mplayer-DOCs, so I hope that someone
> can point me to a resource by means of which I might be able to get sound
> via the local network.

All you have to do is start "nasd" with the "-aa" option, as, for
example,

  nasd -aa -b

(You do have a firewall?) Now "tcp/localhost:8000" should be the
default setting for AUDIOSERVER, so on the host running nasd, try,
say

  audial 1234

and if you hear the touch-tones, nasd is working. If it doesn't, try
setting AUDIOSERVER to "tcp/localhost:8000" explicitly, and export it
into the environment.

If you can't get any sound out of "nasd", you could try tweaking the
configuration file -- mine is in "/etc/nas/nasd.conf" -- or you could
turn on debugging (in the configuration file) and check the error log.

Now on the other host, set AUDIOSERVER to "tcp/nasdhost:8000", and try
the same experiment. When that works, "mplayer -ao nas ..." will work.
To get decent performance, you may need to tweak the "nasd"
configuration file some more (increasing the "fragsize" or
"maxfrags"), or it may be hopeless. It'll be challenging enough to get
decent performance out of "nasd" with video playing on the localhost,
and you're wanting to push video, too.

Frederick