Hi. My first post here. Got N9 couple of days ago. I understand that there is no network video player app. no smb/cifs mounting app. Right?

I, however, used to play videos from network shares over wifi even during PocketPC days... so, old habits die hard, I had to find solution to this

my server is a low power atom running utorrent and file shares, with a pinch of cloud sync and 1080p mp-hc. it is ok as it is, but is too slow for transcoding on the fly solutions like PLEX, SUBSONIC, TVERSITY, ORB

so, I installed hfs (http file server) from http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/

this is a simple one-exe-file that immediately raises file server on a desired port. maybe you can use server of your choice, I guess it is not too important

then, if you open stock web browser and navigate to your files (in my case http://192.168.1.x/Torrents ) you can simply click any AVI file and stock video playet picks it up from there. it, however, only offers to download mkv files. Renaming those to .avi allows streaming them too, but I think n9 is not powerful enough for decoding 720p mkv or any high/mainline encoded h264. so, there is little use in streaming mkvs anyway, unless you have got them properly encoded.

Maybe someone more professional than me can refine this method, e.g. edit some conf files to have stock browser understand "mkv" extension?

You can modify /usr/share/applications/defaults.list to add/remove/change an extension's associated program...

From the file you can see mkv is supposed to open with the video player:

I'm not sure but maybe you've to add a new entry for x-mkv so that it opens instead of saving? Try fiddling with t

I wonder why there is no real VLC client for N9, one of the most usefull Linux software around.
There must be more than this unfinished remote-app, no?...

how to edit system conf files? is there a good editor? I can view this conf with myExplorer. do I need to enable dev mode and use vi in terminal? other methods that do not require voiding warranty?

You can use vi or nano to edit in terminal or you can copy the files to your ~/MyDocs partition and edit using Redak (available from Store) or you can also you MeeTextEdit and there is one more good app I haven't used recently starts with KhTXXXX by Khertan...

Lastly, SSH to edit would also do

MPlayer can play streams, but lacks a good frontend for Harmattan and isn't exactly user friendly without HW keyboard:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/streaming.html
http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/

KMPlayer takes http adresses as argument and can play more file formats than the stock player (supports also mplayer as backend). So you could use that in ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list to play your video files from the webserver when clicked in the web browser.