Distributed file system

Another way to serve the videos is to put them on a distributed file system in a shared folder, for example a dropbox folder. In this scenario dropbox will sync all videos between all computers that share the dropbox folder. The local mount of the distributed file system (i.e. c:\dropbox\) needs to be the same on all clients since it is the server that needs to provide the one and same file serving mapping

Advantage of this solution is that you can share videos outside a local network without and video server and playback is instant since the videos are on the local computers. A huge disadvantage is that every user needs space for all shared videos, it requires a lot of bandwidth, it takes time for the videos to propagate to all computers and you need a large enough distributed file system account for all users.

Do not put the catalog on a distributed file system folder, the catalog needs to be local to the server and should only be accessed by the server.