[MPlayer-users] Using mplayer with NX

[Jan Knutar]

On Monday 02 June 2008 13:17, John A. Sullivan III wrote:

> Sorry for not being more clear.  The web cam is connected to the
> physical desktop.  The user on the physical desktop is using NX
> client to view the virtual desktop running NX server on a different
> physical device.  The user is using mplayer on the virtual desktop
> and needs to be able to control (start, stop, pause, etc.) and view
> the input of the web cam using mplayer on the virtual desktop. 

I very much doubt you can access the webcam of another machine without 
running some helper program on the other machine... Samba/NX is trying 
to read /dev/video0 as a regular file, and MPlayer on the other machine 
probably also sees it as a normal file, and the webcam's v4l drivers 
don't output any usable/identifiable stream without being told what to 
do, and those ioctl's don't get passed across a nfs or samba mount...

If cat /dev/video0 > test.file on the actual machine with webcam 
produces some output, it might maybe be possible to convince MPlayer to 
parse it as raw data with the appropriate raw:// and -raw options, 
which might or might not work across samba, I imagine neither samba nor 
mplayer would be too happy about reading a non-seekable file when they 
think and expect it to be seekable...