Sharing files between Windows and MythTV and Ubuntu

Psyk

Psyk

Psyk

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I have a bunch of videos on a windows machine and I want to be able to stream them to an Ubuntu based machine running MythTV. Can this be done? If not maybe someone could suggest an alternative solution.

Before I was running windows on both machines and I just played the videos from a shared folder. It worked but it was pretty awkward to do it on a standard definition TV so I thought I might try something a bit more user friendly (when all properly set up at least).
 
You will need to install and configure Samba, so you can access the Windows share. Once done, you can have Ubuntu automatically mount the Windows share. It then effectively becomes part of the file system.

For example, I have a share on a Windows machine that gets mounted to /media/davidshare

As far as any software/apps is concerned it is just another folder on your machine :)

Instructions on installing Samba and setting up the mount can be found at this awesome wiki: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty

Just Ctrl+F for "samba" and "share"
 
Thanks that seems to be exactly what I'm looking for :)

Having a couple of problems with it though. I can look at the shared files in the file browser, but I seem to be unable to actually open any. Permissions are set up properly on the windows machine side as I can open them from another windows machine.
 
Ok sorry for the noob questions, but how do I log on as root? I found the command I need to mount the share, but it's telling me only root can do that. But if I go back to the main logon screen, it tells me that root can't login from there!
 
Excellent. Thanks.

I think I've got it all sorted now, even seems to have all the right codecs. The only problem is that it seems the network, isn't fast enough to stream HD videos but that's a whole different problem all together.
 
How fast is your network? I stream 720p videos (H.264/AAC) over my 100 megabit network all the time without problem.

EDIT: My network monitor shows about 45% usage.
 
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Really? Well it's currently running at 100Mbps, but when I actually have it set up where I want it it'll be using 54Mbit wifi. Still doesn't explain why it doesn't seem to be streaming properly as it is now. Could it be that the PC isn't powerful enough to decode it in real time? It's an Athlon 2500 which I would have thought would be good enough.
 
What resolution, format/container, and codecs are in use? My Athlon XP 2800+ with a Ti-4800 are JUST able to play the aforementioned files. It will occasionally drop frames but is generally capable.
 
720p, mkv, x264. Perhaps it can't quite cut it, so maybe i'll have to stick to standard def stuff (I'm going to be using an SDTV for the time being anyway so it doesn't really matter).
 
Using MythTVs internal player at the moment. I don't think VLC is as good as some people think it is. Maybe the Linux version is better, but generally I find the Windows one has a lot of issues and Windows media player actually works a lot better.

Got it running through a TV now and for some reason videos sometimes appear jerky. Well, that happened the first few times I played a video but now it seems to work ok even though I didn't change anything.

One more question that's probably a bit more relevant to this board is how do I make it mount the network folder automatically when I boot up? I found options for startup commands in the "session" section on the preferences menu, but for some reason the mount command doesn't seem to work (getting MythTV to run on startup does though).
 
An Athlon 2500 should have no problems playing video files - i used one running linux - albeit a heavily overclocked one for years - with no problem and still use a pIII 700 which only has issues with mkv files (due to the nature of the files).
 
Psyk said:
One more question that's probably a bit more relevant to this board is how do I make it mount the network folder automatically when I boot up?
Click to expand...
I have never used mythtv - but I assume that it is the same as any other linux config: edit /etc/fstab and add your mounted filesytem... just tell fstab that it's smbfs instead of ext3 or reiserfs (or whatever). Check out the man pages for full details.
 
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