What is Wombat Share?
With so many different media players, on so many platforms it can be tricky for a group of individuals to share legally shareable material in such a way that they can use it in their preferred player transparently.
Wombat share provides a self-contained system that can (should) be extended simply to provide extensions/plugins for all those different media players. Whilst guaranteeing that the media can be played between them. This should (by default) involve no extra configuration/hassle other than the initial installation of the plugin.
Not only that but its implemented in such as way as to be cross-platform, I inted to at the least provide plugins for a Linux media player, although there's no reason why plugins for BSD and MacOS couldn't be implemented.
How does it work?
Wombat share is very simple. It uses UDP multi-casting to 'announce' itself to a local network. All Wombat Share nodes listen to these announcements and make a note of the current network. A given Wombat Share node can communicate with any and all other wombat share nodes. When one node requests a particular file off another node it 'streams' it over a straight http 1.1 (supports byte-ranges) embedded webserver.
What does it cost?
Nothing, nada, zilch. Although payment in comments and suggestions over in the forums would be appreciated. Of course if anyone *does* want to donate something then by all means contact me (wombatshare@wombatinvasion.com)
Will I release the source?
Yes! WombatShare's finally going OpenSource. JWombatShare is coming along nicely and I will release that too.