Sharing videos on my intranet

**rmcellig** · November 9th, 2011

At the moment, I have a Mac formatted (HFS+) external USB hard drive connected to my iMac that I have some videos on. I want to be able to watch these videos from any computer in my house. I have a mix of PC's with Windows XP and Windows 7, two laptops running Mint 11 and Ubuntu Studio.

What are my options?

**mikewhatever** · November 9th, 2011

Samba is the way to go, or I should probably say 'your samba'. You can read more on what your samba is ->here<-, and there is no end of howtos on sharing content. Basically, you just right click your folder, select your 'Sharing Options' and share away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89hjWOb8qmY

**rmcellig** · November 9th, 2011

I know about Samba but I think there might be a problem with the external USB drive being formatted as HFS+. Should I reformat it to something like FAT32 so that it is compatible on all platforms?

**mikewhatever** · November 9th, 2011

Really don't know about HFS+. Regardless, I think NTFS would be a better choice then FAT32, because of the 4GB file size limit in FAT32. A video file can easily go beyond that size.

**Lars Noodén** · November 9th, 2011

Linux can read/write HFS+ just fine, just not journaled. So you may want to turn off journalling. NTFS and FAT are very poor file systems and should be avoided when at all possible. You'll need hfsplus, hfsutils, and hfsprogs.

**CatKiller** · November 9th, 2011

DLNA is probably a good bet. I use MediaTomb on Linux as my media server but there's probably something available for your Mac too. There are DNLA clients for all platforms.

**rmcellig** · November 9th, 2011

I did turn journalling off on the external USB drive but over a share, I can see the files on the Linux laptop. I just can't open them or even copy them over to my Linux HD. I keep getting an error coming up that that capability has not been implemented even though I have a wide open privileges on the USB drive so everyone can access it etc...

**rmcellig** · November 9th, 2011

What is DNLA? I never heard of it.

**rmcellig** · November 9th, 2011

Originally Posted by Lars Noodén

Linux can read/write HFS+ just fine, just not journaled. So you may want to turn off journalling. NTFS and FAT are very poor file systems and should be avoided when at all possible. You'll need hfsplus, hfsutils, and hfsprogs.

So I will need to install hfsplus, hfsutils, and hfsprogs on my Linux machines in order for this to work? I agree about NTFS and FAT32. I'm just looking for an alternative that will work for me.