Q:

How to stream videos over local network to TV from PC

I have quite a bit of hardware already (A Wii U, an Xbox 360, a Chromecast, a Raspberry Pi etc) but I still can't find a good way to watch the videos saved on my Ubuntu computer, on my TV downstairs. Is this possible? Do I need to buy something else to play them? I thought the Chromecast was going to be the answer but I can't find any working software.

A:

While there isn't any support for casting the desktop to Chromecast (yet), you could instead try playing the video files on the Raspberry Pi itself. This could be achieved by using sshfs, which displays the contents of a folder on your computer on the Raspberry Pi by using SSH.

Make sure that you have openssh-client and sshfs installed on the Raspberry Pi, and openssh-server installed on your computer. The following steps will be on the Raspberry Pi only.
Run sudo usermod -aG fuse pi, where pi is the username on your Raspberry Pi, and log in and out of your account for the changes to take effect.
Create a folder that will display the files in your computer. (For example, mkdir computerVideos).
Run sshfs captainjamie@192.168.1.101:/home/captainjamie/Videos computerVideos, where captainjamie is the username on your computer, 192.168.1.101 is the local IP address of your computer, /home/captainjamie/Videos is the folder on your computer containing the videos, and computerVideos is the folder you created in the previous step.
The files in your computer will display in the computerVideos folder. Run any videos you want.

Note that this could be extended to any other files as well.
As noted by @Jos above in the comments, you can use XBMC to get a nice media player interface with support for plugins.

