8
Frank, my sincerest condolences on the loss of your father (and your PC, which certainly is very minor compared to the loss of a loved one, but still doesn't make you feel better). I lost both parents quite some time ago (about 40 years for Dad, about 17 years for Mom), but I still miss them.
I do have a suggestion for debaser (or any other streamer module) however: Add an option for using VLC to stream media files. The command line for streaming an MPEG on port 8080, with Ogg audio compression, for example:
vlc -vvv %path%/%filename% --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,acodec=mpga,vb=800,ab=128}:standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=%servername%:8080}'
This should work for any file for which the server has a codec; I've tested it with a 600MB DivX5 file as the input. I use VideoLAN client to play it remotely (I'm about 19 or 20 km from the server as I write this).
For a Debian-Linux-based server, I would recommend the following command to install the most-needed codes and VLC:
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg vlc-nox
Not sure what the equivalent would be for Dead Rat, Gentoo, and the like, but I'm sure they will be quite similar.
I will say that debaser does *almost* everything I want in a media module.