Playing movies and music over SSH

If you want to remotely access your SSH account (e.g. NAS in home) and listen to the music or watch some movies without downloading them in the first place, you can use the following command:

ssh [email protected] cat mediaFile.avi | mplayer - 

It will connect to your.host.com, log into the user account, invoke the cat command on the given mediaFile.avi and transfer the output (stream of bytes) to your local mplayer.

The mplayer - says that it should read the data from the standard input – which in this case is the result of the cat command.
When you finish watching or listening – just break the connection and no traces are left on your local device.

Alternatively, you can also mount your remote ssh location using the sshfs.