Build your own video broadcasting station with VLC Media Player

Availability of high bandwidth network has opened lots of opportunities for multimedia rich applications. Media streaming is one of the area where audio-video content can be streamed over network. In a typical setup, a machine acts as a media streaming server and other machines simply plays the the streamed video content. This is like having your own TV station present in virtual world where video content is transmitted over TCP/IP network for the audiences.

This kind of network streaming infrastructure can be easily setup using a software tool called VLC Media Player.
This article discuss the basic steps to be followed to stream your favorite videos on network.

The latest version of VLC Media Player is available at http://www.videolan.org/. VLC Media Player is free, open source, portable media player. It supports large number of video playback format without any need to install any extra codec pack. The feature that sets it apart from other medial player is its powerful media streaming option in multiple format.

Here is an example of streaming a movie file over a network. Suppose we have two networked machines. The first machine is having IP address "192.168.0.101" and second machine is having "192.168.0.102". Run VLC Player on 192.168.0.101 and select "Streaming..." option as shown below:

Now add the movie that you want stream.

For destination, choose HTTP protocol and enter the IP address of the machine to which the movie is to be  streamed (192.168.0.102).

 Keep everything else at default and click stream. The status of VLC Media Player will change to "Streaming".

Now open another VLC player at machine 192.168.0.102 and select "Open Network Stream..."

Select protocol as HTTP and address as "192.168.0.102:8080".

That is all required to view networked streamed movie. For this example we have used HTTP protocol, other available streaming protocols are RTP, MMS and UDP.