What is the crowd's opinion of h5ai?

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No need for an html document. Just push the files to a directory on your webserver and let it generate an index itself. There are tools like http://larsjung.de/h5ai/sample/ that allow serving prettier directory indexes (the default looks like that)

Edit: only basic browser controls though. Unless yu let a player plugin like VLC handle the playback

> use icons or a preset layout. I saw something about php, I have no idea what this is or if it is useful.

Have you tried h5ai? Demo

A low-tech solution is to run a webserver on the storage system. You can browse the folders in raw directory mode or install something like http://larsjung.de/h5ai/ and use that, the latter also works nicely with touch devices and even generates preview images. When clicking on a video it is streamed via raw http, which most video players can play, for example vlc.

It's not exactly what you want per-se (it shows a folder structure, thumbnails, and can you can adjust the views and whatnot... its also not a CLI tool, but a php folder/file index), but I use it for exactly the purpose you need it for. It probably wouldn't be too hard to write something in bash that automates it, as you can just wget it and echo whatever into htaccess.

h5ai

demo