Clarification: I normally physically log on to and play media on host A using mpv, displaying the video on an external monitor HDMI-A-2 and playing the audio from host A’s headphone jack connected to external speakers. Today, I tried not physically logging on to host A, but remotely logging in from host B (my phone) using ssh from the same network and running the mpv command from host B. mpv then displays the video on the expected display HDMI-A-2, but it doesn’t play any audio.

Symptomatically, if I haven’t logged on physically to host A, mpv only displays video, plays no audio and throws errors. Why do I need to be logged in on host A for mpv to be able to access audio? You’d think a video feed would be more guarded than an audio one. But maybe this isn’t about security at all? Please enlighten me! 😊

  • apftwb@lemmy.world
    4·
    8 hours ago

    Other people have already answered, but here is where things can get very weird. You can stream the raw video file out of your remote server and pipe it straight into local mpv to decode it at the same time.

    ssh user@example.org cat ~/movie.mp4 | mpv -

    You can also add compression if you want by extending this technique.

    ssh user@example.org "gzip -c ~/movie.mp4" | gunzip | mpv -