Sharing media over internet

[watzen]

Hi,

Me and my friend would like to share our movies with each other.

• We both have a 100mbit internet connection with the same ISP.
• Our buildings are less then 400m apart.
• We both have a home server that stores our media and shares it with SMB within our own local network
• I have a laptop with XBMC and he has a Popcornhour
• we want to be able to stream 1080p h264 movies(sizes of about 10-14gb) directly to our media players

My initial idea is to create a ethernet network bridge between our networks to be able to use SMB(smb is blocked in our ISP's routers).

My options that I have come up with so far are:
OpenVPN

• Hard to setup
• Support non encrypted tunnel for faster throughput

Hamachi

• Easy to setup
• Does not support unencrypted tunnels (in free version).

Windows built it VPN

• Not sure how to setup it to be able to create a bridge between our networks

Anyone out there that have tried to set up such a thing?
And what performance can you get from a VPN-tunnel?

Feel free to add another solution to my problem.

(Would ftp streaming work?)
To ease it up for the xbmc and pch, maybe I could map a networkdrive in windows to a ftp-connection and then share that drive with smb over our own local network(?)

[fekker]

Originally Posted by watzen

Hi,

Me and my friend would like to share our movies with each other.

• We both have a 100mbit internet connection with the same ISP.
• Our buildings are less then 400m apart.
• We both have a home server that stores our media and shares it with SMB within our own local network
• I have a laptop with XBMC and he has a Popcornhour
• we want to be able to stream 1080p h264 movies(sizes of about 10-14gb) directly to our media players

My initial idea is to create a ethernet network bridge between our networks to be able to use SMB(smb is blocked in our ISP's routers).

My options that I have come up with so far are:
OpenVPN

• Hard to setup
• Support non encrypted tunnel for faster throughput

Hamachi

• Easy to setup
• Does not support unencrypted tunnels (in free version).

Windows built it VPN

• Not sure how to setup it to be able to create a bridge between our networks

Anyone out there that have tried to set up such a thing?
And what performance can you get from a VPN-tunnel?

Feel free to add another solution to my problem.

(Would ftp streaming work?)
To ease it up for the xbmc and pch, maybe I could map a networkdrive in windows to a ftp-connection and then share that drive with smb over our own local network(?)

Use the encrypted VPN tunnel, the overhead is only via cpu usage for decryption of the payload in the packets, not in the network packet size. It's secure as well. In reality the overhead for decryption is minimal, even with the highest level of encryption applied to the tunnel. VPN tunnels aren't really tunnels in that they are not constant connections between two points. The tunnel is setup, agreements are made as to the keys, those are exchanged and that's it for setup (short version).. when you go to send data, it's encrypted and sent.. the other side receives it and decrypts it.. sure the packet is wrapped, so there is a tiny bit of overhead, but it's not much. VPN's are wicked cool stuff for sure, clientless VPN's that pass traffic over SSL rock the house.

If your running linux on your machines, use ssh / sftp.

[watzen]

The solution I went for(for now at least) was:

I have setup a http stream server (myihome) that his popcorn hour can pick up.
He has setup his ftp server so that I can access it.