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Video sharing/streaming/?

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Mcgreag:
I have a largish anime collection (about 7TB) currently sitting on a bunch of USB drives. This collection is mainly used at our anime club that up until now hasn't had an internet connection other than a not so stable 3g connection. What I have done so far is download stuff at home, mainly from BakaBT and when my local drive starts to fill up I move all the usb drives home so I can sort, remove duplicates etc and anidb index it before moving them back to the clubhouse. This is not a very efficient process but I haven't had much choice.

But now we are finally getting an wired internet connection at the club so I am looking for a solution to make this easier. My connection at home is a very stable 100/100 fiber connection. At the club we will be getting ADSL either 24/3 or 10/1 (if 10/1 is fast enough we will go with that as it is cheaper and the club doesn't have much of a budget). So I am now looking at a solution that means I won't have to physically move the discs back and forth all the time.

I am basically looking at 3 possible ways to do this.

1. Keep the data at home and share files to the clubhouse using Hamachi or something similar.
I have a working setup with Hamachi but I found it to reduce the transfer speed so much it was mostly unusable. 2 computers on the same local network with gigabit connection got less than 8mbit/s when using Hamachi even when it said they had a direct connection. Testing with the wireless internet at the clubhouse yielded even worse results. But if I can get something like this working with decent speed it would be the optimal solution.

2. Keep the data at home and set up some sort of stream on demand software that can stream the video instead of the video files like option 1 would do.
We prefer to just use MPC-HC with no mediacenter software (we have tested XMBC and MediaPortal but found both to be really bad), not sure how that would work with this solution. There is also the question of varying audio and subtitle tracks etc. Manually preparing all troublesome files is not an option.

3. Keep the data at the clubhouse and ftp in or similar to upload things from home.
Would be much more difficult to keep things organized this way which is the main deterrent from it. There are also the question of transfer limits as there are going to be much more stuff transferred this way (we watch at most 10% everything I collect, but we like to have everything available).

So does anyone have a any tips or suggestions or solutions to our situation? There is also the question of what connection speed to get. In theory 10mbit/s should more than enough for 720p (we have a 720p projector and therefor don't keep anything above that) but what about in practice with all the overhead and other inefficiency (see hamachi comment above for example)?.

Bob2004:
What operating system do you have on your PC at home? If you're running Linux, or some other Unix variant, then Mediatomb is a great piece of software for streaming video over a network to other PCs. It just streams the whole file, then the client decodes and plays it itself, so it should work fine with whatever format you throw at it. The downside is there's no Windows version, and I can't think of any other equivalent software for Windows. You might be able to get it running in a virtual machine or something though perhaps.

As for the network speed, if it is actually 10Mb/s, then that should be plenty. But since it's ADSL, it might well be significantly less than that, depending on the line, distance from the exchange, etc, in which case it could potentially be problematic. The only way to know for sure is to test it and see.

ColdFission:
If you are on a Windows platform, maybe you can create your VPN connection and then you can share-out the folders from your home pc to the clubhouse. Would be faster if you were to share-out folders via a Homegroup with the VPN. You now don't have to depend on Hamachi servers to get your VPN. An alternative VPN service I've used successfully for RDPing is TeamViewer.

http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2009/08/how-to-set-up-a-vpn-connection-in-windows-7/
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/4517-virtual-private-network-vpn-enable-incoming-vpn-connections.html

Furthermore, I think you can configure your home PC firewall to accept connections from the Internet (well, your club house) to gain access to your shares. So when you enter your home PC's IP address from your club house, it should prompt you for some user and password if your home PC is password protected (should be anyway). The settings in the firewall at home that should be checked off for Public use would be Homegroup (if you want to use Homegroup sharing) and Network Discovery. You can use VPNing with this as well. I haven't tested this before as I just thought of this while typing this xD. I was successful in RDPing from overseas to my home computer when I just entered my public IP for my cable modem and I was able to get in (with user and password of course), so if it works works with RDPing, it should with file shares.

As for streaming, I can't think of any media server tech that would properly carry subtitles properly and that was one big stumbling block when I want to watch anime on the HDTV. The solution I came to was to simply connect my laptop via HDMI to the TV and access the content via shared folder within my Homegroup (using the "Network" section in explorer is a little slower for browsing but playback performance was the same).

Anyone can correct me if I am wrong with anything and I hope the post was a little helpful at least.

halfelite:
If you store them at your house and want to stream them to the club use something like llink or swisscenter they are both http streamers that send the video feed out over http you just connect to it with vlc or something. And connection speed shouldnt matter just tell vlc to buffer enough of the video so that if your connection drops a little it wont skip the video

kitamesume:
1) if you're rich, buy MOAR HDDs! and make a mirror copy, leave the copy on the club and the original on you house.

2) if you're not so rich, get a good enough connection and stream through it, hopefully it doesn't stutter like hell.

3) if you cant afford most of the above, then buy a carrier bag and drag the HDDs! lol...

edit: yea the 10/1 should be enough for 720p so long as you dont go play 720p with nasty bitrates... i think it wouldn't be enough for 1080p with nasty bitrate and file size though, i mean 10GBs per 1hr 1080p.

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