Building a Simple Streaming Media Server?

neomage86 asks: "I'm looking for a simple Network Jukebox. I want to be able to stream media from a Windows (it has to be Windows for other school work) server to remote machines over a LAN (only 1-2 clients at a time). I want to be able to choose the song that's playing from the remote machine, video would be nice, but not necessary, and it should be free (as in beer, I'm a student). Any ideas?" "For some quick background, I'm an undergrad with a desktop PVR with several hundred gigs of media on it. I also have a laptop, and use computer labs fairly often. Anywhere on campus, I can expect to get a minimum of 10 megabits/s between my current machine and the PVR. My first thought was just Windows file sharing, but it breaks often (I'm not sure why, I have an Apache web server, and FileZilla ftp server running on the same machine that never go down) and I can't install Samba on the Solaris lab machines. Ideally the client should be web based, so I don't need to download anything to receive, but that is optional."

Comments

GNUMP3d?

[stevey]

GNUMP3d is a perl based streaming server which allows you to share a music/video/multimedia archive across a LAN.

Whilst it's designed on Linux machines and only sporadically tested under Windows it should do the job you want - point it at a directory with your media files in it, then fire up a browser to choose your songs / stream away.

Failing that Andromedia should do a good job if you have PHP on your Windows version of Apache. Their personal edition is cheap, and I think there's a free version somebody wrote designed to mirror it - but I've spoken to the author and he's a good guy so I'm happy to recommend it.

SlimServer

[MadChicken]

http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html

I've only used it on Mac, but it works very well. You can select media from a web interface.