Check out Plex - https://www.plex.tv/
I run it on an Nvidia Shield, it will transcode multiple streams on that and handles pretty much everything I've thrown at it so far.
I run it on an Nvidia Shield, it will transcode multiple streams on that and handles pretty much everything I've thrown at it so far.
It is fundamentally locked into itself. You need to either have a device which can run the web client, or a Plex app for the platform. And that works fine if you're doing this just for yourself (I've run a Plex server in the past).
But sharing media is painful (or at least, more painful than simply sending a link to someone), and the overhead of compatibility was always annoying. Additionally, if you don't like the way the Plex app works on your device, tough, that's the only UI there is. However, there are a tremendous number of apps and applications with UIs galore that all support HTTP streaming.
Now, the last time I fully investigated Plex was about a year ago, but since then I've used friends instances and it always seemed lackluster, or at least not as straightforward as bare-bones HTTP streaming.
(Arguably, Infuse is very compatible with whatever your video source is, but it only runs on iOS.)
Alternative client/UI: check out PleXBMC, you can use any theme you like. That said, plex media player will provide a superior experience as it's using mpv.
Also /r/videostream
The transcoder is pretty intelligent. It starts up full-power until it reaches a comfortable buffer and then dials back to an acceptable framerate to maintain stable playback while not melting the CPU. It only transcodes what it must in order to get the video to play on a device. My Roku, for instance, can handle H.264 encoded video and AAC/AC3 audio, but it won't play them back if they're stored in a Matroska (MKV) container, so the transcoder leaves the video/audio streams alone and just converts the container format to MP4 for playback. On my TVs that aren't hooked up to 7.1 systems, it transcodes only the audio. I have a small handful of files that are HEVC encoded and have nothing that supports that, so the entire video/audio file is transcoded in those cases, but to my wife and family who enjoy Plex, they don't have to think about it. I can tell when it's transcoding vs. playing directly because it'll stick at 33% for a second instead of just playing the video instantly, but they're used to Netflix/Hulu/Amazon which all have mild buffering before playback so they have no idea that something's going on in the background to deliver their video.
It's a good solution as far as I'm concerned. At the end of the day, all of my videos play and they're a pretty good variety of .avi (with a mix of video/audio codecs), MKV/MP4 (almost all H.264/5) and a few one-offs (I haven't tried playing a few .asf files I have lying around but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they worked -- it uses FFMPEG to do the transcoding so depending on how they compiled it, if FFMPEG handles it, I'd imagine Plex would, too).