I found myself with quite a problem today. I wanted to go to bed early, but I also wanted to view the latest movies I had gotten hold of. That meant, for me, burning out the files I wanted to view on a DVD and watch them on my laptop. Quite frankly, I didn’t really feel like it wasting a DVD I’d probably end up throwing away anyway.. So I searched for an easy way to stream my movies, and voila, there comes VLC. I found this this article on Engadget about how to take use of VLC to stream movies, so I’ve modified it a bit and added some screenshots of my own, and changed some text.
One of the first things you need to do is get hold of a a copy of VLC media player for your platform. In this case we’re streaming from a Linux-machine to a G4 Powerbook. If your operating system is different, I wouldn’t worry – the interface looks pretty much the same on all operating systems.
Once you’ve installed VLC, run the program, and click File -> Open File to bring up the Open dialog box.
Click on the Browse button to bring up a file selection box, and select the file you wish to play. Should you want to make a playlist just select several files, and VLC will build one, so once you’re done, press Open.
Click the checkbox for Stream Output and then click the button Settings.
Check the box next to Play Locally under Outputs. When streaming to another system you don’t have to play the file on the server, but we will use this option to visually confirm that our video is playing properly before trying to access the stream from another computer.
Check the box marked UDP and type in the IP address of the computer you want to stream the file to. Should you want to reduce the quality of the movie, which helps stream the video should you be on a not-so-okay connection, check the box Video Codec and reduce the Bitrate. Click OK once you’re done. The file is ready to play so click OK in the Open dialog box too.
The video or audio file should begin playing on the computer. The last thing to do before switching to your second computer is to turn on VLC’s web interface by clicking Settings -> Add Interface -> Web Interface.
Open VLC on your second machine. We are using a G4 Powerbook.
Click on File -> Open Network Stream. UDP is already selected so you just need to click the OK button and VLC will start playing your stream.
Now that the stream is successfully playing on your computer you can open up a web browser to control VLC remotely. Type http://<IP_of_your_server>:8080/ into the address bar. The web browser will present you with all of the controls you need to manage playlists and playback remotely.
You should now have streaming up and going!
