You won't believe – The Port Forwarding concept

Scenario

Imagine wanting to stream video from a device behind your home router to your personal phone over the internet. This may sound like a complex task, but with port forwarding, it's simpler than you think.

What you need:

  1. A Wi-Fi Router
  2. A computer displaying the video feed connected to the Wi-Fi router
  3. A VNC viewer on your remote mobile device

The Solution:

Port forwarding is the secret sauce that makes this setup seamless. Here's how you can do it:

Steps:

Router –> Computer –> Display | Internet –> Mobile –> VNC

  1. Lets Visualize the network diagram as above.
  2. Be physically near your router.
  3. Login your Wi-Fi router with credentials.
  4. Navigate to Port Forwarding section. It must be in the Security section.
  5. Set the Port forwarding rules 5.1. Service Name: Give the port forwarding rule a descriptive name. 5.2. Port Range: Specify the range of ports you want to forward (e.g., 5900- 5901 for a single port). 5.3. Local IP Address: Enter the IP address of the device on your local network that you want to forward the ports to. Refer my previous post on How to make a connected device static. 5.4. Protocol: Select the protocol for the port forwarding rule (TCP, UDP, or both). 5.5 Keep WAN HOST IP as 0.0.0.0

We are done here!!! See its that simple. Lets now test it over is my port open? website.

On Personal Mobile over Internet

  1. Install VNC over mobile phone
  2. Enter the router public IP followed by port number eg. 24.57.121.123:5900
  3. Suppose you don't have a router public IP address handy you can get it from what's my IP address? website.
  4. Above IP means that in the router public IP, connect to device at port 5900
  5. Enter credentials and we are done!!!

Limitation

  1. Since your router IP changes after reboot. Refer my previous post on How to get free url for Router's public IPs
  2. If the local device streaming feed is not static. It me loose the IP after device restart. Making device static is better solution. Refer my previous post on How to make a connected device static.

Thank you !!! Follow Mrinal