[shelhezan]

Hey there,

actually I was figuring out how to watch videos on my PlayBook I have downloaded. I felt quite uncomfortable putting them all on my 16GB PlayBook. So I search for an alternative.

Because I got my Raspberry Pi a week ago or so, I was tinkering with it a bit. Finally I came up with an idea to host my own webserver on it to serve the videos. I looked around in the depths of the internet and found out that,

1. the PlayBook is able to render HTML5 videos
2. a webserver called cherokee is able to put them on a page and serving them via HTML5

All I had to do was just setting up Cherokee the right way and give it a chance to catch my videos from an USB harddrive. I started the server and BUMM! Everything went fine from the first try.

Well, you will not have any advantage of just telling you what I did, so I will come up with a tutorial to show you what to do.

The downside is you have to use Linux or a virtual machine with Linux in it. But don't worry, it is not hard to configure it all.

Prerequisites

Despite the ability to set cherokee and all this stuff up on just one machine, I will go the easy way first assuming you have a spare pc to install a Linux flavor on it.

First step (I assume you have set up a Linux distribution with a working ethernet connection)

If you use any kind of Debian distro (such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint), grab cherokee with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cherokee cherokee-admin

Maybe you have to add the PPA first by executing the following

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cherokee-webserver/ppa

For Fedora or RedHat just

yum install cherokee

it.

Second Step

After installing cherokee successfully start the admin webinterface by executing this in the command line

cherokee-admin -x -b -t

And leave this running until I tell you to shut it down with Ctrl+C.

This will give you a one time password for logging in into the admin webinterface. The second information we need is the URL. Point your browser to the URL and don't forget the :9090 (If the URL is localhost and you are working on the same machine, everything is fine. If you'll access the interface from another machine get the IP address of the machine first and add the port number to it). A pop up will come up asking you for a username and a password. The username is admin and the password will be the one time generated password.
Then you will see something like this


If you start the interface the first time the webserver won't be running. We will turn it on later. Make sure to head over to the vServers section.


There you will find the root of your server. That's very important because that's the directory where you will put your videos (either by copying them or set a link there).

Then click on Behaviors in the tab section and on Rule Management afterwards.


Click on the big plus on the left hand side upper corner and navigate to tasks.


And there is the thing we want to enable first of all. Click on the Media file streaming and proceed with the wizard showing up.

After that you will have to put the videos into the directory which you detected in the second image I posted here. I have a USB harddrive mounted to my machine. What I did is this:

cd /srv/http
sudo ln -s /path/to/your/videofolder/ [name of a folder]

Either way you can copy the whole stuff to the directory with

sudo cp -r /path/to/your/videofolder/ /srv/http

I wouldn't prefer this way because your are duplicating your videos.

Then switch back to the cherokee web interface and click on Home and start your webserver.
Now you can close the running programm in the console and point your browser on your PlayBook to the IP address without the port number. In my case it is just 192.168.178.25 and I see the following


Now I can navigate around and click on the videos to be streamed to my playbook.

I hope this helped a little bit for those who have a glipse of an idea how to work with Linux.
Maybe I have the peace to post a way to set this up with VirtualBox and an virtual machine containing a Linux distro on the same machine. Sadly, cherokee isn't available for Windows.

Regards

shelhezan

[ThaSwapMeetPimp]

Cherokee may not be available for Windows, but forum member pauldriver already set this same basic deal up for windows users using lighttpd and php called Simple Media Server for Playbook (sms4pb), look for the thread "Got irritated, wrote a media server for my PB". It's got a decent interface including previews. I think it works for Linux and mac, also, but I could be wrong.

[pacoman03]

Can someone explain to me how this is either better or easier than using ES File Explorer, or Lan File Explorer, or Streaming Now, or even Splashtop to stream video to the PB?

[ThaSwapMeetPimp]

Can someone explain to me how this is either better or easier than using ES File Explorer, or Lan File Explorer, or Streaming Now, or even Splashtop to stream video to the PB?

Yeah. It's free. I don't know about es file explorer, but the rest of the apps you mentioned cost money, so running a server on your computer that streams to your Playbook for free using native functionality is preferable to people who don't like paying for extraneous apps. Why I use PaulDrivers SMS4PB.

F@&% extraneous apps.

[pacoman03]

ES File Explorer is a free sideloaded app, and doesn't need a dedicated server running on your PC to work.

[shelhezan]

ES File Explorer is a free sideloaded app, and doesn't need a dedicated server running on your PC to work.

And my solution is one of many others. Please stop ranting. If you do not see where there is an advantage, do not complain about it. There are other people who like to use software which can be configured to their needs. And of course there are some downsides too (e.g. you need a second devices or at least a VM).

I came up with this because I have a Raspberry Pi flying around at home. This thing is pretty neat in serving such services.
And maybe others have a computer to spare and want to try this out. I do not say my way is the one and only way to do it.

Regards,

shelhezan

[pacoman03]

It wasn't a rant. I asked a question as to why your method is better than using one of the available apps to connect to one's desktop- maybe there is some added functionality that I'm unaware of. Just because I don't necessarily see any advantages, doesn't mean that there are none.