Screaming Video

Ok the truth is that I Couldn’t think of any other title for this entry other than “screaming video”. Now before you start to wonder what I’m talking about or if this is a typo I just might go ahead and explain myself.
The other day I setup a small home network between two computers to share resources, an internet connection and a printer. Someone then asked me if there was a way a video played on one of the computers could be watched on another and then I remembered Video Lan Chat or the VLC player (www.videolan.org). So I decided to setup up video streaming on that network making use of VLC player. Well the truth is I have been using the VLC player for more than 3 years because it is really a silver bullet for video formats as it can play almost all kinds of video format straight out of the box. So if you do not want to install a codec pack and yet want to have access to different video formats, VLC was a very good key. Now when I think back I wonder why I had never tried the streaming video functions that come with it.
So I got online and checked out what people where doing with it and was so shocked. It was so simple to setup that it took less than 10 clicks on the System I used as the server and the system I sent the video to. And it supports almost all kinds of video formats, operating systems, and also is available on hand held devices! Let’s not forget its support for DVDs, TV tuner card, Satellite TV, digital TV and even video encoder cards. It even has a web interface which meant that I could control the server from virtually any computer on the network. I could create playlists remotely, control volume, make my video full screen or not, pause and so much more. The experience has been such a rewarding one that all I have been doing on that network has been streaming video.
VLC is so flexible that you could stream on a windows server and pick it up on a Mac or Linux client or in any other possible arrangements you could draw up from those options.
And not only can it be used on a LAN it can also be used on the internet. So really the possibilities are endless. And all this from a very light weight application that is really friendly to use and packed with more than enough codecs? I tell you streaming video the VLC way is such a very smart and cool way that it screams!