Advice on small network solution

[cheuschober]

Hi! Long-time user, first time poster.

So I'm looking for advice on what would be the best solution for serving media on my home network. I've read all the user guides and numerous posts and while I wouldn't say I'm 'confused' on the matter I would say that the scales seem to be balancing rather evenly.

My Media
A varied assortment of dvd images, losselss and lossy audio, xvid's, h.264, mpeg2 streams and several more. The media is hosted on a 1.2TB raid 5 linux software array fileserver with a full-duplex jumbo frame connection to my gigabit switch.

My Clients
I have up to 4 clients -- a windows media centre pc with a gigabit connection to my switch and 3 wireless laptops: two linux machines and one mac.

My Network
Gigabit switch + home-built pfsense linux firewall/wireless router with two wireless cards (wireless subdomains).

Goal
What I would like to do, of course, is set up my fileserver to be capable of sending streams to each of the four clients if requests are made. Unfortunately while I may be capable with the idea of setting up streams and connecting to them my roommates are not and need as simple an interface as possible (something akin to file-->open if not that exactly).

Assuming I have a large amount of media, all of which I want available at all times to my users, what is the best solution? It sounds VoD'ish, I know, but I'm concerned with the idea of having to set up VoD objects for every single piece of media each time my server-side VLC has to be restarted and I'm also concerned with how the user finds the available VoD objects in a simple and easy interface. Are the VoD objects searchable?

Alternately if I were to, say, create a gtk+ application that would gui a file-select box and behind the scenes telnet into my server-side vlc installation to set up a unicast stream via vlm, connected the client vlc to the stream and brought up my client's web interface would I stand to gain anything?

Or, lastly, is there some fusion of what I want already in the web interface and maybe I'm just not seeing it? (I'm currently working with 0.8.4).

Thanks so much for all your help and I look forward to hearing your expert advice on the matter!

Best,
~Chad[/u]

[Mimiru]

well, try to use the web interface of VLC

it may meet your needs