Video Streaming

One thing me and my co-workers have been trying to do is to share videos. Most of the time we use IM or a mapped drive to share funny videos with eachother... of if it's a DVD, everyone has to crowd around one PC to watch. We spent a few months trying to find a way to stream any video source across a network for free; giving up last year in disgust.

Well, we finally found it. VLC VideoLan allows you to multicast any media source (.avi, .wmv, DVD, MP3s, etc) to any other computers. Right now I'm streaming a bootleg copy of the HULK DVD across the network to 4 other people around this floor. They are all watching it at the same time. Very Very Cool.

There are options to stream via UDP, HTTP, MMSH and RTP.. The manual is lacking but the software runs on Linux, Win, BeOS, etc... I strongly suggest you download and play with it. Right now we're using the client portion to both stream and view. But the server code is supposed to be even more robust.

VideoLan Website