Access from the outside world

[donburkard]

Hi. I know its been talked about before but not sure what ever happened other than several of you going "DONT DO IT".  i wanna do it.  Im going to start traveling every week soon and i want to be able to access the thousands of iso's i have on my unraid servers from my laptop in the hotels ill be in.  i also have an xp box running mainlobby next to the unraid boxes so if i need to run something on there i can. simply put, what do i need. im not apposed to buying some sort of software or even a service as long its reasonable.  I really dont want to spend 500 a year but i wouldnt mind 50 or 75 a year as long as it allows me to stream my iso's. Can this be done?

 

thanks

[unraided]

Hi. I use a remote management service called logmein. I'm currently using the logmein free edition as I only require remote control of my guest pcs that I have and to a management server so I ccan telnet/ssh/webgui to Linux/UNIX servers I have as well. From memory, the paid versions of logmein have the capibility to support smooth video and audio playback and have greater desktop control, including file transfer from remote to guests, etc ...

Go to www.logmein.com for their products and services. I would suggest that you would require a fairly decent broadband connection at the guest premises and at your remote location for smooth video and audio playback. logmein doesn't require purchasing of any hardware and works though most firewalls too. The great thing is too that you can trial their products for 14 days free for the paid editions, so it would give you some time to properly evaluate whether it suits your needs. Good Luck.

[gabbott]

For remote access to your xp box, check out teamviewer, great remote management software that is free for personal use.

[donburkard]

Thanks for the replies guys.  I do have logmein free right now with ignition on my iphone but it doesnt support video streaming.  Neither does pro unfortunately.  music yes, video no, unless its in a format that is displayed thru windows media drive as apposed to the video card aka wmp only.  Booooooo.  I honestly wouldnt even be apposed to some sort of ftp if thats what it takes as long as the download only takes a few minutes and not an hour.  I looked into cyberlinks service because they say access ALL your files, videos, music and pics from anywhere, but low and behold, again, iso's dont make the cut.  i have been buying bluray for about 65% of the new movies i buy but would really like to stay away from that digital copy bs.  I figured ill use it every so often on the plane but if im buying a freakin blu ray movie, i damn well want to watch it on my hd projector in my theater, not on a plain with some fat smelly guy snoring next to me.

 

thanks again. keep the input comin

[gabbott]

Keep in mind you'll be limited by your home internet connections upload speed which could limit your ability to directly stream remotely.

[Joe L.]

  I honestly wouldnt even be apposed to some sort of ftp if thats what it takes as long as the download only takes a few minutes and not an hour.

To download in a few "minutes" you need to have a file size that can be transmitted within a few minutes at the "upload" rate supported by your internet service provider.

 

If you have an "extremely fast" internet connection you'll get as high as 5MB/s upload.  (This is unheard of for most service providers.  Most average much much slower speeds.)

 

For example, my "roadrunner" cable service get me:

Download Connection is:: 7933 Kbps about 7.93 Mbps (tested with 12288 kB)

Download Speed is:: 968 kB/s

Upload Connection is:: 315 Kbps about 0.3 Mbps (tested with 579 kB)

Upload Speed is:: 38 kB/s

 

Now, let's multiply the 38kB per second times 120 seconds...  We get a grand total of 4560kB (or about 4.5Megabytes of data)

 

I'm not an expert with Blue-Ray ISO images, but I'm guessing most movies are a bit more than 4.5Meg.  In fact, most movies I have on my server are standard definition DVD ISO images.  They average about 4 to 5 Gigabytes in size. I would guess blue-Ray ISO's would be bigger... closer to 30Gig from what I've read.

 

In any case, let's just concentrate on a standard definition DVD.  At 4.5Gig it is about 1000 times bigger than the 4.5Meg you can upload in two minutes.  It will probably take 2000 minutes to upload it at 38kB/s.  2000 minutes = 33 hours. 

 

You are right, it will not take an hour...  It will take many hours.

 

If you were lucky enough to have a connection where you could upload at 5MB/s (and download at the remote end at that speed too) it would take at least 15 minutes to upload 4500MB (4.5GB)  It would still take more than a minute or two.

 

Perhaps now you can see why you cannot stream an ISO image... not without transcoding it to some other very highly compressed format.

 

[donburkard]

yea my speed her kinda sucks.  also i was not really thinking about blurays.  i was mainly thinking about my standard def dvds of which i have thousands. fifteen minutes wouldnt be bad buy the way. let me ask this, if i may. 1. Does anyone have any experience with vlc player streaming stuff?  2 Would some sort of ftp thing (whatever the hell it is) help?  i downloaded one of them but have had kinda a hard time setting it up.  Im not real good with routers so thats been a bit of a challenge.  3 is there any benefit to having a website built where i can just enter a user name and password and "host" them from there?  I wouldnt really be apposed to that cause from that i can add some of my mainlobby automation stuff as well.  Thanks for the feedback. keep it coming. i appreciate it

[purko]

i was mainly thinking about my standard def dvds of which i have thousands. fifteen minutes wouldnt be bad buy the way...

Would some sort of ftp thing (whatever the hell it is) help?

You're not paying attention.  

 

Fifteen minutes of uploading from your home network will give you about 35MB of data.  

That's 50 seconds of DVD video at best.  

 

So yes, I agree, uploading a whole DVD movie in fifteen minutes wouldn't be bad!

Uploading a whole DVD movie in fifteen seconds would be even better!  

 

[donburkard]

yea your right.  i missed the whole 33 hours comment.  forgive me. im ready to blow my head off.  my wifes ENTIRE family is here!!!

this may be a stretch but what about a sling box?  is there any way to rig one up to work somehow?  i could even stuff an extra pc and a tv in a closet if i had to.

[Joe L.]

I've never used it, but perhaps something like this:

http://www.orb.com/

running on your XP box will do what you are looking for.

 

It is not a remote desktop to your PC, but a transcoding engine combined with a file-browser.  Think of it as a software version of a slingbox. (and I don't own a slingbox, so I have no idea if a slingbox or ORB can play dvd ISO images across the web.)

 

From what I remember reading about "orb" , it is free, although you'll probably view some advertisements. 

 

Joe L.

[Loch]

There are a ton of media streaming applications with varying costs and simplicity, usually inversely proportionate. Orb is a very common one that has an iphone app as well. From what I have been told, it is fairly straight forward to set-up (on XP) but I have heard mixed reviews of it's functionality. Other options include:

 

Slingbox (hardware solution)

SageTV - more PVR style, esp good if you record TV

Opera Unite - just found last week but provides numerous type of sharing beyond just audio/video

numerous others

 

Since your DVDs are uncompressed, you will need transcoding to compress the bitrate down to an acceptable level for upload from your home connection.  You can check out your speed with speedtest. Then google should provide you with more an enough options.

 

Don't forget about the security concerns as well. you will have open ports that can be seen by everyone. You can look into putty and ssh to secure the connection as needed. 

[donburkard]

orb wont do iso's.  i use it now for other stuff though.  ill look into slingbox and opera unite.  thanks guys

[Joe L.]

orb wont do iso's.  i use it now for other stuff though.  ill look into slingbox and opera unite.  thanks guys

If your ISO is only the movie, and not contain menus, you might get it to work by adding .iso to the allowed set to suffixes.  (This is according to their support forum)  Other posts suggest using helper programs to mount the ISO image first.

 

See here: http://forums.orb.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=10076&hilit=iso

 

Again, I've got no experience with orb, I've never used it.  I just searched for .iso in their forum.

 

Joe L.

 

 

[unraided]

To my knowledge, slingbox is of course hardware based and works on a video input (don't know whether it can read media like a media player/htpc can off a NAS unit, though it might too). The compression rate is supposed to be good. I know a mate of mine who has a brother in England. The brother in England would stream live Cricket onto it via a TV signal and the brother is Australia connects to it via a web site directly to this slingbox. From there he watches live cricket on it. Personally I've never seen it in action so I can't vouch for it, and the unit involves a yearly subscription too (I think), but I've yet to hear any complaints, and I'm imangining it would require at lease a decent ADLS 2+ connection to run it smoothly too. Now I know you want to run movies from this kind of service so I would think it would be able to stream media from your unraid server too (don't know about iso's though).

[donburkard]

Yea i know i wont be able to stream the entire iso(as is) but i can easily get on using logmein an mount the image in deamon tools like i always do, push play when powerdvd or vlc starts up with the menu and viola.  from there i would just stream the output of whatevers being "seen" by the sling box right?  I guess now all i have to do is breakdown and buy a sling box.  Thanks guys!!!

[Joe L.]

Yea i know i wont be able to stream the entire iso(as is) but i can easily get on using logmein an mount the image in deamon tools like i always do, push play when powerdvd or vlc starts up with the menu and viola.  from there i would just stream the output of whatevers being "seen" by the sling box right?  I guess now all i have to do is breakdown and buy a sling box.  Thanks guys!!!

From what I know, slingbox takes a composite video input.  Does your PC have a video out (single yellow connector with red & white for audio)

 

I don't think it takes VGA output.

 

Joe L.

[unraided]

I think some models only input is via composite:

 

http://www.slingmedia.com/get/io_1261439643930.html

 

though their seems to be a newer model which supports video via HDMI, see belew:

 

http://www.slingmedia.com/get/io_1261439797138.html

 

Both models support outputs to everything like composite and HDMI.

 

 

[Rajahal]

I've been down this path, and nothing I've found works the way I want it to.

 

My solution is just to build an external hard drive of whatever size you wish (I went with 1.5 TB), then fill that movies and whatever else you want to carry with you.  Simple and easy.  Sure, I can't carry every bit of media I own with me, but it is at least enough to get me through a few weeks of travel.  When I get home, I just swap out everything I watched for something new.

 

You can also build a 'portable' external (2.5" instead of 3.5") that is powered by a second USB port, so that you wouldn't need a separate power adapter.  The only downside is that your max disk size will be 500 GB (at the current time, at least).

[Joe L.]

You can also build a 'portable' external (2.5" instead of 3.5") that is powered by a second USB port, so that you wouldn't need a separate power adapter.  The only downside is that your max disk size will be 500 GB (at the current time, at least).

 

So far Rajahal gave the best idea.  500GB that's average 100 DVD movies.  Will you be able to see 100 movies during your trip?  

You don't even have to build anything!  They now sell those slick tiny 'passport' external usb disks that are just that. They're like half size of a paperback book, and are very light, and don't need external power.

 

And... if you are just going to watch on crummy hotel TVs (or screens less than 50 inches in size), you can convert the ISO images to .avi files and store 5 or 6 hundred on the 500Gig drive.  I did exactly that and loaded a 400 Gig drive in mg MG-35 media player for when my wife and I are traveling.  Even highly compressed, it still looks OK on a small screen.  I do not compress the DVD ISO's for watching in the theater.  There, even a small amount of additional compression is very apparent on a 110" screen.

 

I mounted my ntfs formatted disk using ntfs-3g as writable on /mnt/disk/hdi1

I then populated it with this short shell script after installing handbrake on the unRaid server. All of my movies have an .ISO extension.

 

for i in /mnt/user/Movies/*.ISO

do

f=`basename $i .ISO`

HandBrakeCLI -i $i -t 1 -o /mnt/disk/hdi1/$f.avi -f avi -p -e ffmpeg -S 700 -a 1 -E lame -B 160 -R 0 -6 dp12 -D 1 -v

echo $i

done

 

 

Joe L.

[unraided]

With the costs of these portable disks, as

suggested it would be better to just copy you movies onto it and that is that. most newer laptops have 500 GB disks and that would avoid you carrying a portable disk with you.

[Rajahal]

With the costs of these portable disks, as

suggested it would be better to just copy you movies onto it and that is that. most newer laptops have 500 GB disks and that would avoid you carrying a portable disk with you.

 

True, if you have the space internally, use it.  My laptop uses a 60 GB SSD, however, so I use an external for portable storage.

[unraided]

You could trade speed and power (the current SSD drive) for heaps more storage (Traditional SATAII 2.5in disk, or in some cases, 1.8in) in your laptop I guess Rajahal , but yeah, I'd have to say (and other seem to be siding on this idea too) that it would be a lot easier and cheaper just to buy a portable disk enclosure with a disk already in it. Western Digital sell $320GB for $89 AUD (RRP), albeit a lot cheaper in America and other countries alike, but you can go up to 500GB without using a additional power source, though 1TB disks would require a power pack to get it running.

This would no doubt be the most convenient, easier, less cumbersome way to watch movies while on the go. The use of remote access to watch movies (well at present anyways) will not work very well. In the future when broadband speeds increase dramatically, even with wireless 3G being bumped up to 4G and data plans becoming more generous and way cheaper, this idea would become more viable, but for now donburkard, I'd invest your time and money on just buying a portable disk, copy the movies and enjoy.

[guiri]

Doesn't teamviewer need to be started on the remote machine?

 

I use it to help friends. LIke it much better than logmein as it's given me lots of installation problems but logmein can be unattended