 A couple days ago, I was talking with someone on the IRC channel. Their name was Woodsy, I believe, so Woodsy, if you're watching, I'm not sure if you quite understood what we were talking about in the IRC chat room. Basically, Woodsy was trying to get VLC to stream his music for him, which I have done videos on, it's pretty simple, but he was doing it with a server that had no gooey interface to it. And by default, even if you're running stuff in the background, it seems like VLC wants to have X running or some sort of display manager. Reading quickly, it doesn't seem like it has to be. I mean, you can definitely get VLC running completely on a server, a headless server. But talking to him more, I think that necessarily, I think that VLC streaming wasn't necessarily, once again, VLC streaming from the server was not the best option for what he was doing. I think streaming like that's great if you're into some sort of radio station, streaming video, live video or something, where you have a lot of people watching and you want everyone to see the same thing at the same time. But he was just trying to listen to his playlist on his server, in which case I don't think VLC in that way as a server application is necessarily the best option. It definitely is an option and would work. He wanted it because I guess VLC has some sort of remote control that he can adjust the streaming, skip songs and stuff. But my opinion, I think a simpler solution and give you more flexibility would just to be start up a web server, whether it be Apache or some other lighter HTML service or web server if you needed. And just put your music in a folder that is shared on that web server and then point whatever media player you're already using at it. And pretty much all modern media players can stream music from a web server. He was concerned that he wouldn't be able to skip songs, fast forward songs and yes you can. So, surprise, tutorial on Wednesday. I know I don't usually tutorials on Wednesday, but I thought that this would be a good chance to do this. So let's jump right in. I already have Apache running on my machine because it's as simple as app to get install Apache 2 at the current time or whatever web server you prefer. There's plenty of them in most package managers, for most distros. Install it and here we go into the tutorial. Okay, so the tutorial is going to help Woodsy, the user, the viewer with streaming his music. So, real quick here, I have got my music thrown onto my server in the other room. It's just in a folder, nothing special about it. I do have indexing enabled. And there are a lot of media players, pretty much all media players. Once again, we'll stream music, no problem. Player like XBMC will automatically grab information from an index like this and just start playing it. Some other players you might need to create a playlist. So that's what I've done. Let me go here to my terminal screen. If I cat out, I have a file called music.m3u. It's just a text file with a list of the MP3s, which I generated from the index we were just looking at. So at this point, I can do something as simple as using mPlayer. I can do dash playlist if I spell stuff right and point it at that file. And if I hit enter here, it will start streaming the audio. I'm not going to let it play here, really, because I don't want YouTube to get upset about copyrighted music. But as you can see, I can skip to different songs. I can jump ahead in songs. And you can see right here what songs I'm playing. And of course, I can get all the way to the end of my playlist. And of course, that's using mPlayer from the command line, which there are GUI interfaces for mPlayer. But here is a movie player that Totem is the movie player. And I can just go open, point it at that, once again, that text file. That's just a list of the files from the server. Click add. And you can see that now it brings up the art. It also doesn't just show the file names. It actually will, if the files have the song names and tracks, they will display that here. And we can skip through, jump ahead. We can also do the same thing with videos. So it's flickering a little bit, trying to display the art and my little animation here at the same time. Not sure why it's doing that. But it's playing the audio just fine. And then here's another example just to show. Here's VLC on the client. And in this case, I can go open file, point it to that text file. Once again, that's our player. VLC does not seem to convert the song titles. It just shows you the complete URL. But the song still play. I can jump ahead. I can stop. I can pause. So not the only option. If you need to, you can stream audio with VLC as a server. But I think that doing this way is a little bit simpler. And it's easier to jump around songs when you're streaming. I guess VLC, as he was saying, has some sort of remote control to control the server. But this way, different people can be listening to different songs if more than one person wanted to. If you're streaming using VLC, everyone's listening the same thing, which may be what you want. But talking to him, it sounded more like he wanted to just listen to his playlist and have controls to be able to skip songs and jump ahead in songs. And that's exactly what we're doing here, just with a simple web server, Apache, in this case. And I just threw all the songs into a playlist. Once again, you don't even need a playlist with some players like XBMC. If you just point it at this address, it will see the list of songs. And you can click Play and put them in a playlist there and put them in random order or whatever you want to do. So real simple, so I thought I'd show that today. I hope this helps you out because you did seem a little confused on what we were talking about. You thought that if we threw it on a web server like this, you had to download the song to play it and you wouldn't be able to stream and jump ahead in songs. So that's it, a quick little tutorial there. I hope you found this useful. If you have any questions, please visit my IRC channel. Go to my site, filmsbychris.com. That's Chris with the K. Click on Social Network Working. There's a link to the IRC. We are on free note. It's Pound Films by Chris. Also feel free to comment below if you have comments, questions. I would not recommend putting them in the comments, but people still will. I'll do my best to answer them. But thank you for watching. And I hope that you have a great day. .