Streaming video in your home can be a complex problem but with the right combination of software it could be achieved quite simply. In order to accomplish this we first want to make sure all our videos are in a compatible format. Most videos currently stored on the backups can be converted to an appropriate format using the following command on Ubuntu.

avconv -i input.mkv -c:v copy -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 192k output.mp4

Combining this with technology such as VideoJS and your solution is close to completed. Of course these needs some sort of http server but using Apache or something similar this may be set up in a jiffy. Only thing really missing is a password protected administration system which may require some sort of LAMP stack.

When changing some settings on the samba server while having the service in use it might be of interest to reload the new configuration file without affecting existing connections. This could be done in the following manner.

killall -HUP smbd

This will send a command to the smbd process making it reload the configuration file.