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playing movies over ssh

mcgarry

mcgarry

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 19, 2004
616
0
I am trying to play movies stored on one computer's HD on its screen, but controlled from a different computer. Here goes:

So I have one computer, A, with its own display. I have another computer, B, on which I have logged on to A via ssh.

If I have set A in advance to have, say, Windows Media Player open at "Full Screen," when I type on B's terminal prompt open moviename.wmv, a file on the HD of A, it begins playing in full screen on A. If I do not have Windows Media Player open at all, it will open at a default size which is less than full screen.

My questions:
- from B, with the open command or something else (maybe using x11), can I set at what size the new window will open up on A?
- besides kill to stop the movie, is there a way to pause it or otherwise control the movie playing on A, from B?
- what video player would work for this best (QT, VLC, etc.), or is there some shareware that handles similar setups?

I am obviously a command-line newbie, so sorry if I missed something obvious. I feel like there is some very simple way to do this, and I am just overlooking it for lack of familiarity.
 
Can't answer your query, but I don't like your "location:". I hope you're a gamer, otherwise it's not very funny.

With ssh, you'll have to create a tunnel, first, although this is built-in for X11 stuff (-X option). VLC has client/server streaming options; you may want to look into it.
 
whoops, sorry about the loc, I can take that down ... it's a line from a very popular, non-explicit-lyrics song.
 
does anyone care to add more detail to daveL's suggestion?
 
You know that YOU have to be logged into the remote mac, right? OR, you have to have admin rights on the remote Mac in order to open as another user via "sudo -u remote_username open -a Safari".

No, you cannot pass arguments for size to Aqua apps.

No, you cannot pause/play/stop the remote apps via Aqua.

For all that you should use something like VNC (as noted above).
 
yellow said:
You know that YOU have to be logged into the remote mac, right? OR, you have to have admin rights on the remote Mac in order to open as another user via "sudo -u remote_username open -a Safari".

No, you cannot pass arguments for size to Aqua apps.

No, you cannot pause/play/stop the remote apps via Aqua.

For all that you should use something like VNC (as noted above).
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tips.

Yes, I am doing this with two machines on my LAN. I am logged into both machines.

I assume you meant VLC ... any more details on how exactly it can help me? Ideally I am trying to play and display on one computer (not stream from another), but controlled from another. This might be more trouble than it's worth, but I'd like to know if it's possible.
 
mcgarry said:
Thanks for the tips.

Yes, I am doing this with two machines on my LAN. I am logged into both machines.

I assume you meant VLC ... any more details on how exactly it can help me? Ideally I am trying to play and display on one computer (not stream from another), but controlled from another. This might be more trouble than it's worth, but I'd like to know if it's possible.
Click to expand...
I think he meant VNC (a way to view displays remotely) but was assuming you were trying to play a movie from A via SSH on B's display, which, as I read it, you aren't. Or that you'd need to have A's display visible on B to control the app (most likely what yellow meant).
 
jsw said:
I think he meant VNC (a way to view displays remotely) but was assuming you were trying to play a movie from A via SSH on B's display, which, as I read it, you aren't. Or that you'd need to have A's display visible on B to control the app (most likely what yellow meant).
Click to expand...

Yeah, sorry, I'm confused ... yellow said "as noted above," and it was VLC noted above by daveL, not VNC. And I know VLC has some streaming options. but I don't know if it can help me with what I am trying to do.

Any other suggestions, besides that I should get back to work and quit fussing with this?
 
Ooops, yes I meant VNC for remote operation/viewing, not VLC.

And I may have misread your previous post. For what I was detailing:

You're are sitting at A, and ssh'd into B.

You want to play a movie on B's display.

The movie that you want to play HAS to be on B, unless you stream it from A with a quicktime streamer or some such, or you're using X11 on both.

You CANNOT do it with Aqua because Aqua is not built to function in that capactity without the help of streaming servers etc.. And to control it's GUIfied window on B, you will have to use something like VNC.

On other topics, here's a tutorial for command-line basics in darwin:
http://osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/index.ws
 
Ok thanks. Do you (or anyone else) know that this can even be done with VNC? I mean, are you saying it is possible, but very difficult?

Is there something specific in the tutorial you wanted me to look at? True, I am not well-versed in the land of Terminal, but I do serve my own sites and use it for management of that, so I am ready to learn at least a little more.
 
To use the analogies of above..

You are sitting at A.

You open a VNC connection to B.

Now your monitor on A looks like you're sitting at B. Everything you do to the VNC screen is happening on B, not on A. It's only being displayed on A.

VNC is a remote control app, good for headless servers and remote administrations and things of that nature. It won't really help you much in this endeavor.

No nothing specific to look at, since I have no ability to accurately gauge your knowledge via a forum. Just you had mentioned being a 'command line noob' and that is a good resource for true n00bs. Your experiences may vary.
 
OK. So in sum, neither VLC nor VNC can help me.

Even though I can start the movie playing at full screen on A (from A's HD) while sitting at B, using ssh, I cannot control it from B other than to kill it.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'm still open to suggestion.
 
mcgarry said:
Even though I can start the movie playing at full screen on A (from A's HD) while sitting at B, using ssh, I cannot control it from B other than to kill it.
Click to expand...

Not via command line.. however.. if you sit at B and open the movie via command line on A and then open VNC on B and connect to A's VNC server, you can then control the GUI on A as if you were sitting at it, but you're sitting at B. Not the most elegant solution, but it works. Sorry, this has gotten quite confusing! :)
 
yellow said:
Not via command line.. however.. if you sit at B and open the movie via command line on A and then open VNC on B and connect to A's VNC server, you can then control the GUI on A as if you were sitting at it, but you're sitting at B. Not the most elegant solution, but it works. Sorry, this has gotten quite confusing! :)
Click to expand...

Still, I'd like to try it ... so I download a VNC client, like Chicken of the VNC or something, then somehow make the computer with the movies on it enabled as a VNC server, presumably by downloading something else. Then I start playing something over ssh from the remote computer, but control play via a VNC client.

Anyone have any suggestions for what to download, or tips to help make this work? I've never used VNC before, are there some obvious pitfalls to avoid?

Security shouldn't be too much of a concern, as this will all be taking place on my LAN, behind the router's firewall.
 
it works

Ok, thanks yellow, it works!

I used Share My Desktop as the server program and Chicken of the VNC as the client. I don't need to use the cli at all.

Performance was very sluggish, with lots of network traffic, as I might have expected. But since the file is on the same computer doing the displaying, isn't there a way to minimize this? I am testing this on an old G3 (server-side), so that might also be part of the sluggishness explanation.

Any more VNC tips?
 
Personally I don't use VNC.. we've been using Timbuktu for many years and we're quite happy with all it's bells and whistles. However, VNC is an opensource GPL'd app, so it good to suggest to folks.
I can't offer any tips on tweaking though, sorry..
 
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