Engadget How-To: Stream Almost anything using VLC

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000910070121/' target='_blank'>http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000910070121/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The VLC media player is an amazing piece of software. In its most basic form it is a lightweight media player that can play almost any audio or video format you throw at it. VLC is also multiplatform in the most extreme sense of the word; it can run on Windows, OSX, Linux and PocketPC / WinCE handhelds along with other systems. VLC works great as a streaming server and video transcoder too. We used VLC to move Tivo recordings to an iPod before, but today we are going to show you how to stream any type of media file from your computer to another device on your network. We will also demonstrate how to remotely control VLC using any web browser. Using these techniques you could stream video from your office computer to a laptop plugged into the living room TV and control the playlist with your PDA."</i><br /><br />If you're into this sort of thing, it looks like a powerful solution for streaming media across your LAN.

[jeffd]

I actually use VLC for 2 vastly different reasons.

#1 it can play even the most horribly incomplete video files. Vdub and even movie players can make some headway into playing videos that have a beggining but are missing chunks in the middle. AVI's will fail if the end is missing (vdub will attempt a very long aggressive load at this point). And neither of these options work if the beggining is missing (no header info). VLC how ever will keep scanning untill it finds a start of the video feed it can work with, AVI or Mpeg. I use it alot to varify videos I am downloading from p2p networks like Emule.

#2 Absolutly no need for windows codecs to be installed. VLC dosn't even do anything with the windows media system. All the codecs it uses (and its ALOT) come with the player, piled into its own directory. So its a great tool to stick on someones computer who isn't savy enough to obtain the required codecs for todays movies. Also VLC supports MKV. Even I have been largly un-succesfull in getting MKV to work all the time, and it annoys me to no end the number of new codecs and splitters needed to get it to work, so I just let MKV play them all.

Best of all, VLC needs no install. You can opt for the zip version and just dump it into a directory and run.