| Summary: | Sharing locally stored media files like music, videos and pictures has not been user-friendly for a long time now. Nowadays people, when they know where the media is stored, have to use the complicated network shares or external storage solutions like USB sticks, hard drives or even CD/DVDs to share media across different users. When the users do not know where the media is stored, they have to use Internet-based peer- to-peer applications like LimeWire, KaZaa or the Gnutella-network, which requires searching and downloading the media first, before being able to actually make use of it. But what if you do not have an Internet connection, do not want to mess around with external storage solutions nor want to wait while downloading or copying from a (network) device, but still want to make use of the media stored on another computer system? Indeed, nowadays there is not any easy solution that provides a very user-friendly, fast and responsive, flexible and stable solution for this. This problem brought us to our research question: “Is there a very easy solution for sharing or watching media throughout the local network?” After some research we stumbled upon some state-of-the-art technologies, which came very close to what we wanted to achieve, however, still having quite some drawbacks, not suitable as a solution for the problem mentioned above. We decided to innovate and tried to find a solution without any drawbacks while still being very user-friendly. We achieved quite good research results showing that: • Using a client-only network was the most efficient and flexible way to provide a stable network structure; • Java was the best programming language to provide a cross-platform application; • For compatibility with the media sharing itself an object-oriented based indexing storage structure, like db4o, yielded the best flexibility and speed in comparison with SQL or other technologies; • The streaming of the media could be achieved best by making use of Java VLC libraries. The user-friendliness of the demo application that we created was also very good, only a few clicks are sufficient to share your media across the network, no need to bother about user rights and so on. We can conclude that our research can be the base of a very successful innovative media sharing system and strongly believe, with some more adjustments in the future, that it has potential to become a very popular application along the media sharing industry.
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