Geeky
I’m currently watching The Wire on my laptop while waiting on Long Island with nothing to do. I’m pretty proud of this, because I didn’t remember to bring a copy of the video with me.
I know my home IP, but the only forwarded port is SSH. I tried using scp to copy the video file directly, but I can only upload from home at about 200 KB/s, so it would have taken an hour just to copy. I didn’t want to wait that long, and Quicktime refused to stream-play the partial file as it downloaded. The only way to convince Quicktime to play the file would be to read it from a mounted network share.
I found out what the AFP port was, but I didn’t have it forwarded. My home computer has VNC enabled, but the VNC port isn’t forwarded either. So I SSH-tunneled to enable VNC forwarding, then used VNC to use the router’s web config interface and enable AFP port forwarding.
But the file was still too big to stream in real time.
So I used command-line ffmpeg to recompress the movie at a lower bitrate. And I’m recompressing the next few episodes simultaneously (gotta love 8 cores) as I happily watch the first episode in Quicktime on my laptop.