A few days, I moved my desktop computer out into the living room. The computer has a tuner card that can receive digital broadcasts. I don’t own a TV, so this is the closest I’ve got to one. I still have to set up lircd before I can use a remote, but I wanted something a bit easier
Today, I discovered a new trick … SSH X11 Forwarding. Now, I can play video on my desktop right from my netbook. It’s wonderful and very simple!
In the following instructions, the “A” refers to the computer playing the video and “B” refers to any other computer.
- Make sure “X11Forwarding Yes” is in your sshd_config file on computer A. Restart sshd if you had to uncomment/add it.
- On B, run `ssh -XC A`
- In the ssh session, type `DISPLAY=:0.0`.
- Now run mplayer or any other video player in the ssh session and it will play on computer A.
If you want to have a program run on computer A and use the screen on computer B, the process is very similar:
- Make sure “X11Forwarding Yes” is in your sshd_config file on computer A. Restart sshd if you had to uncomment/add it.
- On B, run `xhost A`
- On B, run `ssh -XC A`
- Now run mplayer or any other video player in the ssh session and it will play on computer A.
Step 2 authorizes use of the current display by computer A and only needs to be run once. Also, note that the display variable doesn’t need to be set when using B‘s screen.
Mplayer works wonderfully when playing on my desktop, plus I control it via the ssh session. It has tons of keyboard shortcuts. The ones I use the most are space for pause and the arrow keys for skipping around.