Rclone mount to index cloud drive but not for "direct" streaming

Help and Support
1

I have a setup where I have my media player read files from the rclone mount. I assume when I stream a video file that it is read by rclone and passed on to the video player.

My question is if there is any possible way to have rclone pass on the direct access to the video file so the video player streams it from the cloud drive directly and not through the rclone mount?

I'm asking because going through the rclone mount has been much slower for me than streaming a file directly.

I hope I was detailed & clear enough to explain what I'm trying to do.

2

Yes you can play with rclone cat e.g.

rclone cat | vlc  -

please note that not all video formats are streamable

though not sure what problem are you trying to solve. Is your mount so slow that it is impossible to watch anything?

3

@kapitainsky Let me explain my new setup attempt. I have used Infuse on my AppleTV and I connected my Dropbox Advanced account where I store my media files. Infuse indexes it and it can stream basically any file type you throw at it.
The problem is, indexing is slow via this method.

So now I’m trying it via my rclone mount of my Dropbox (located on the remote server) and it is indexed by Jellyfin. That worked really well. It indexed it fairly fast and I could browse all the available media via Infuse as my player. This was especially helpful because everyone in the family has their own Jellyfin account and it can update very quickly in all the devices.
The problem now is that streaming speeds seem too slow even though the server has a 20Gbps connection and at home we have 1Gbps.

If the Jellyfin index would grab from the rclone mount a direct connection to the file on Dropbox (not sure if this is possible) then each Infuse client could stream the media straight from Dropbox without having to send the data from Dropbox ⇨ server rclone mount ⇨ Infuse client.

Would the rclone cat command help with this?

4

What you mean by this? You can have 100Gbps network but when you stream file it only uses whatever video format requires. Or you mean that now you can not watch anything? Is it what "too slow" is?

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Yes, it is too slow with this new method but Infuse reading/streaming straight from Dropbox has no problems playing back 50GB movie files in whatever video format.

6

maybe there are some infuse/jellyfin users reading it able to help.

7

@hari9 - your setup sounds similar to mine. I run my Plex server on a remote server, which also mounts the media via Rclone. The server's latency to my house is usually in the low 70ms, and this works well for the most part. Would it be better if the clients had direct access to Dropbox? Yes, definitely, and I think that's what you're asking. That's impossible, though, because we're both working with a (remote) server/client setup where the server has to have access to the mount in order to stream the media.

So, unless I'm misunderstanding something, the only thing you could do is run both your Jellyfin server and Rclone mount locally. In that case you'd only deal with one latency, the one to Dropbox.

8

I think the short answer is you can stream from Infuse directly to Dropbox but not if encrypted.

So if you are encrypting your data, it's not possible.

If you are NOT encrypting your data, you can scream directly from Infuse with Dropbox.

it's documented here -> Streaming From Cloud Services – Firecore

I use Infuse with Plex for all my Apple devices over the stock Plex client as it's much better (imho).

9

So, in that case the media server is only used for indexing and otherwise bypassed entirely?

10

With Infuse, you can do zero media server and not use Plex / Emby or Jellyfin and operate solely by itself.

Infuse was built to run independently and Plex/etc was added after.

1 Like
11

Ah OK, that's what I thought. Sounds like OP used this method up until recently, but has now switched to a Jellyfin server/client setup.

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I wish Jellyfin/Plex could index the rclone mounted Dropbox drive with links to the files that directly connect to Dropbox so that Infuse streams it straight from there and bypassing the rclone mount needing to relay the streamed media files.

But based on everyone’s feedback, that isn’t possible. I could run it locally but my family streams not only from home and then I’m sure my home server would be slower than the cloud seedbox I use for this.

I really appreciate you all chiming in on this.

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