xgrr.de – the whole not the half

For my server at home I want a clean media streaming solution not involving any kind of webserver. VLC is capable of doing all kind of streams. For video on demand only RTSP is usefull. In combination with the HTTP interface for VLC this becomes quite a nice streaming server for all kinds of media stuff.

One big problem this solution has of course. RTSP or better RTP is not made for NAT. So the actual media is not transmitted through a firewall. I did some extensive testing with my VLC at home. There is actually no possibility to force VLC to use a specified client port. With all my tests VLC ended up using a port starting from 2500 udp. I didn’t play it through and tested where it’ll end.

This means your clients or viewers need to configure their firewall according to this port range. VLC does not support any kind of proxy or STUN so this is the big problem.

Here is how I run my VLC (Server). Note that the -I http switch starts the VLC webinterface on port 8080.

vlc -vvv --color -I http --rtsp-host 0.0.0.0:8554

Here is how you point the viewers VLC client to the stream.