Stream Avi video over LAN.

[powerMarkymark]

Running Windows XP Pro, can I stream Avi to play on the computers connected oner my LAN?

I've Googled this but came up dry.

TIA

Marc

 

[drag]

Look at the VLC media player project.

Originally developed for Linux and ported to many platforms it has the ability to receive, play, and stream a wide veriety of formats and hardware devices..

 

[WannaFly]

VideoLAN

 

[powerMarkymark]

Thanks guys, this is a great player.

Can't get the streaming to work though (I want to multicast), any tips would be appreciated.

I did read the documentation but they are vague with the particulars.


TIA


Marc

 

[JackBurton]

I'm not sure exactly sure what you're asking, but why don't you just share out a drive with the avis and just have the client use Windows Media Player to play the video files? A LAN (typically 100Mbps) has plenty of bandwidth to play avis (I'm assuming your avis are DivX or Xvid).

 

[drag]

Multicast is weird.


It's designed for the internet or stuff with complex network topography with routers and such...

Say you have a hundred clients. They are seperated from your server by a spiderweb of routers.

So you send out one stream to all of them, instead of unicast were you send out one stream for each client.. which the standard way of streaming.

If your stream hits a router that has your clients on more then one port, and the router supports it, then it will duplicate the stream for each of it ports. Then each router should do the same and so on and so forth until every client gets his or her own data stream. This was based of off the mbone network which was suppose to make video conferencing practical over the internet. Unfortunately many ISPs use technology and routers that don't support that, even though the internet backbones do.

If your network is fast and not to conjested then unicast would be the prefered method. One stream for each client.

If your network is simple, say a network of PCs connected by a simple hub or switch, then broadcast would be the best way for large bandwith streams.

Also there is another form of multicast that is different. What it does is that each client that receives a stream also transmits it back out for another client. Like how P2P programs like bittorrent works. I am not sure about how VLC does it. I think that this is how things like Shoutcast/Icecast work.

Not to sure.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: JackBurton
I'm not sure exactly sure what you asking, but why don't you just share out a drive with the avis and just have the client use Windows Media Player to play the video files? A LAN (typically 100Mbps) has plenty of bandwidth to play avis (I'm assuming your avis are DivX or Xvid).