FTP Media Server
A simple media server written in Java with just enough of the FTP protocol implemented for it to work with VLC.
Usage
Just run the jar file. Right now it supports no configuration
and serves the current directory on port 2121.
Security Notes
This server does not use encryption or any password protection.
However, care has been taken such that files outside the current
directory cannot be downloaded (e.g. using ../).
Motivation
I wanted a simple way to stream media from my computer to VLC on my Android phone or Android TV.
Normally DLNA/UPnP is the de-facto standard here, but it has two issues:
- Good implementations of UPnP often comes embedded in a full-featured media server which is not something I want. I just want a simple way to serve files from the current directory.
- UPnP is great when it works, but when it doesn't, it's a pain to debug.
Thus, I went and look for the simplest protocol VLC supports that also supports directory listing. VLC does not support directory listing on HTTP so the next simplest protocol was FTP.
First, I tried to run one of the standard FTP servers written in C. However, they were full-featured FTP servers meant to support read-write and multi-user usage. They were hard to set up correctly in a self-contained way (e.g. without adding users to the system passwd file) and wanted to be run as root. Some of them also do not work properly with VLC.
So finally I have decided that it would be the easiest to just implement a simple FTP server in Java.