The VideoLAN Forums

Hey everyone,

I hope you're all doing well! Lately, I've been experimenting with VLC Media Player, exploring ways to stream videos from my PC to a friend residing in a different country, spanning distinct networks. Let's imagine I've set my local IP address as 203.0.113.1 and designated the port number as 8080, leveraging the MMSH protocol.

Following the guidelines provided in the VLC interface, I've successfully set up the stream, using mmsh://my_ip_address:8080 as the stream URL, and have disabled "display locally." Despite successfully configuring port forwarding and opening the port on both my router and desktop firewall as well, I've still been encountering an issue.

For any PC connected to the same LAN wifi, the PC on that network is able to access the stream successfully, no issue. However, attempting to stream to a PC outside my local network, (to my friend in this case) results in the following error message "VLC is unable to open the MRL mmsh://my_ip_address:8080 ".

I speculate that the root of the issue may lie within the router's configuration or perhaps a firewall setting that eludes my attention. If any of you could spare a moment to share additional insights or offer troubleshooting suggestions based on your expertise, I would be immensely grateful.

Thank you kindly for any assistance you can provide!

Cheers.

Hi, what is your OS?

You should setup the network first, and then try with VLC. To setup the network, you can use much simpler tool such as netcat to check that everything works and would connect correctly.

If the stream can be seen from other LAN devices, then the local firewall configuration is ok, and you'll need to check the router configuration instead.

Though you already probably knows it, opening a port to the world is quite dangerous, and you might want to setup a backend which is more audited and security-proof instead of exposing VLC directly. Wireguard would be a simple alternative to make this working if the network configuration reveals to be too hard to setup, you'll be able to setup an external machine as "public endpoint" to connect the two other machines together with a breeze.

Hi, what is your OS?

You should setup the network first, and then try with VLC. To setup the network, you can use much simpler tool such as netcat to check that everything works and would connect correctly.

If the stream can be seen from other LAN devices, then the local firewall configuration is ok, and you'll need to check the router configuration instead.

Though you already probably knows it, opening a port to the world is quite dangerous, and you might want to setup a backend which is more audited and security-proof instead of exposing VLC directly. Wireguard would be a simple alternative to make this working if the network configuration reveals to be too hard to setup, you'll be able to setup an external machine as "public endpoint" to connect the two other machines together with a breeze.

Hi! Thank you for the response, I really appreciate it. Sorry for the late reply too, I got caught up with some unexpected tasks and just everyday life. I'm currently using Windows 10, but booted up Linux to test VLC with netcat and everything seems to be working correctly, but still with the same issues of only being able to connect over the local network. If it's not too much of an ask, regarding setting up Wireguard, could you provide some guidance on how to configure it as a secure alternative? I've been experiencing some slight trouble with the network configuration, particularly in ensuring secure external access to the VLC stream.

Hi, basically you would setup wireguard and open a port for it instead of VLC. This would be the open "endpoint" for the VPN access (but it's also possible to use an external server and avoid opening a port that way).
Your friend would be able to setup wireguard on his end too. You can exchange public keys to allow the connection, and then allow an ip on each side. If you use wg-quick, it would also setup the ip automatically so that would not need more configuration. For instance, your friend would have 10.0.1.10 and you would have 10.0.1.11.

Then, you can expose the mmsh server to listen on 10.0.1.11, and your friend can open mmsh://10.0.1.10 (your friend ip address) and it would go through wireguard, but won't be accessible outside.