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.

[JvanEkris]

VLC is a great tool and it indeed can stream anything. Greatest plus is the possibility to dynamically transcode (real-time!!!) the movie for optimal use on the client.

BUT it cannot easily stream to PocketPC. The only client it really works with is the VLC-pocketPC client. All formats it can output are not nativly recieved by Windows Mediaplayer or other third party players (like BetaPlayer, PocketTV, etc.). I have tried with many video-formats, but none of them work smoothly. VLC does not get activated when you press a link, newer tools like TCPMP are not able to recieve this kind of streams (there are two types of streaming: a push-type provided by VLC and a more pull-type provided by FTP-servers etc.).

I must say i've tried until last summer, but i haven't seen much change since....

Jaap

[Fabrizio Fiandanese]

Actually I've been able to stream divx videos to my Pocket PC from Video Lan setting HTTP as transfer protocol and loading the file url in the awesome TCPMP Media Player (http://tcpmp.corecodec.org/) . It worked flawlessly.

If any of you is interested in a step by step guide, please let me know :)

[JvanEkris]

What kind of container for the video and audio did you use then (and what kind of audio and video settings did you use?)? Because that would solve a challenge for me.

Jaap

[Fabrizio Fiandanese]

What kind of container for the video and audio did you use then (and what kind of audio and video settings did you use?)? Because that would solve a challenge for me.

So, I encoded my DVDs using the amazing Pocket Divx Encoder (http://divx.ppccool.com/) then I launched VideoLan Wizard and opted for streaming those files via http port 8080 using ASF compression.

Then I loaded TCPMP on my Pocket PC, opened the file selection screen and typed in the desktop pc local address which, through activesync, is always 192.168.55.100.
So the complete stream address was http://192.168.55.100:8080

That's all and it worked like a charm :way to go:

[q-live]

is it better than orb???? i can stream everything to my ppc phone using orb.com