While recently incapacitated, I took some time to get MythWeb set up and running. It was no sweat – just installed apache with PHP support on my Myth box, and installed MythWeb. gentoo makes it all easy as pie.
The icing on the cake is to install VLC on the client. During installation, make sure you check the box to include the “Mozilla plugin”. Next, you’ll want to install the MozAmPeek Firefox extension – warning: I had to go to the company’s web site to get a working version. Configure it as instructed – just go to the options page, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Then fire up MythWeb within Firefox. Click on any video link, and you’ll be prompted to open the link, or stream it to VLC. Selecting that option gives you instant access to all your videos. My wireless LAN (wireless-G+) has no problems playing everything. My videos just went mobile, whoop!
Note that under Vista, VLC needs this little tweak to show video.
I set up the MythWeb site to be accessible globally, via port forwarding on my internet-exposed server. Since this means anyone can get to it from anywhere, I set up apache’s basic authentication to keep the riffraff out.
I am left with two small details to iron out:
- With authentication turned on, VLC streaming does not know how to authenticate, and fails. I therefore turned off authentication for now.
- Port-forwarding works great from a purely external address. And on the LAN, I can access the Myth box directly. But when trying to use my proxy to access MythWeb, I first go through the proxy, and then attempt to do the port-forward, which doesn’t work once inside the LAN. So I need to smarten up and get my port forwarding working so that internal and proxy traffic use it as well.
OK, I’m back. The links to recorded videos on [MythWeb -> TV -> Recorded programs] are gorgeous, with nice thumbnails taken from within the program. But the links do not have extensions, and I had the hardest time figuring out how to get Firefox to stream the recordings instead of trying to download them first. Until I found this helpful link, which pointed me to the Launchy add-on.
