web-stream

web-stream is an http-server that, when connected to, yields a web-interface for navigating the filesystem below the configured root.

When the user clicks on a video file, web-stream starts encoding it to webm using ffmpeg and serves the resulting file, while it's still being encoded. Because webms can be viewed with most mobile browsers, this can be used to stream movies from your PC to your phone.

Table of contents

• Installation
• Configuring the server
• Configuring the web-interface

Requirements:

• As web-stream is written in go, it requires an up-to-date go environment to work properly.
• To be able to encode the videos, web-stream requires ffmpeg.

Installation

To install it, simply run the following commands:

go get github.com/froozen/web-stream
$GOPATH/src/github.com/froozen/web-stream/install.sh

Now you're good to go! You can now move on to the configuration.

Configuring the server

web-stream is configured through a json-encoded config file, that can be found under ~/.web-stream/config.json.

The default configuration file looks something like this:

{
    "port": 2223,
    "args": [
        "-threads", "8",
        "-quality", "realtime"
    ],
    "hooks": [],
    "filetypes": [".mkv", ".mp4"]
}

Changing the root-value

The first thing you will want to do is changing the root value to point to the directory you keep your movies in. The default is ~/Videos.

To do that, simply add a line like this:

"root": "/path/to/the/dir"

The args-value

The default arguments for the ffmpeg-command look something like this:

ffmpeg -i file <args> file.webm

Without any args this won't do much more than encoding the video, which will be pretty slow. If you want to speed up the encoding process, you'll need to pass additional arguments to ffmpeg. The args in the default configuration file are a pretty good start, but you might still want to configure them to your liking.

Note: Each argument must be a single string in the list. For example, to automaticly scale the video, you'd need to add:

"-s", "1280x720"

Dynamicly generating additional args using hooks

There are cases, when you'd want to dynamicly generate arguments instead of staticly predefining them. Luckily, web-stream has hooks for that.

hooks are commands that are called every time a file is encoded. They receive the filename as the first argument and print a json-list of strings, that will then be added to the args for the encoding.

Example: This is a hook that adds subtitles to the video

#!/bin/bash

# Generate the tempfile name
a=$(mktemp -u sub-XXXXX.ass -p /tmp)

# Extract the subtitles
ffmpeg -i "$1" -threads 8 -an -vn -loglevel quiet -c copy $a

# Print the arguments
echo "[\"-vf\", \"subtitles=$a\"]"

Note: A hook printing something invalid will result in web-stream abborting, so be careful.

Other values

These are a few other configuration options, which are rather self explanatory and therefore don't need a whole paragraph of text for each one:

• port: This is the port web-stream will listen and serve on.
• filetypes: This is a list of the filetypes that web-stream will encode and display in its web-interface
• delay: This is an integer value representing the time in senconds that is waited before serving the file for the first time. This can be viewed as a sort of "buffering" mechanism. The default value is 3 seconds.

Configuring the web-interface

Because of my lack of web-design skills, the default web-interface doesn't look all that great. Luckily, the templating system is pretty simple, so it should be no problem to edit the files yourself.

The templating system replaces every comment in the form of <!-- Data:valuename --> with the data corresponding to valuename.

All of the following files can be found in ~/.web-stream/web

• style.css is served over the /style url and is the css-stylesheet for the pages
• page.html is the template for the whole page. The insertable values are:
  • DIRNAME, which is the name of the directory corresponding to the page
  • CODE, which is the code generated for the files and directories in the directory
• file.html and dir.html contain the templates for the code snippets used to represent a file or directory contained withing the displayed directory. All of them together form the CODE-value. The insertable values are:
  • PATHNAME, which is the path leading to the currently displayed directory
  • ITEMNAME, which is the file- or directory name