How-To: Stream almost anything using VLC
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.
The first thing you need to do is grab a copy of VLC media player for your platform. We are going to be streaming from a Windows machine to a Linux machine, but the interface is almost identical no matter what you are using.
Once you install VLC and start the program you will be greeted by this lightweight frontend.
Click “File > Open File…” to bring up the “Open…” dialog box.
Click on the “Browse” button to bring up a standard Windows file selection box. Select the file you want to play. Then click “Open”. We’ve selected multiple files so VLC will build a playlist.
Your selection should appear in the text box next to the “Browse…” button. Click the checkbox for “Stream Output” and then click the button “Settings.”
Check the box next to “Play Locally” under “Output Methods.” 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. Then click “OK”.
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 Linux machine.
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.
Now that you’ve got full access to your 10GB of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from any device in any location there’s only one question left to answer: Where does all the dirt displaced by the Technodrome go?
| Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments [45] |
Recent Entries
» Samsung concept devices range from strange to wacky (12/11/2005)
» iubi PMP2010 100GB PMP (12/11/2005)
» TextPayMe enables mobile-to-mobile fund transfers (12/11/2005)
» Play-Doh fingers can fool 90% of scanners, sez Clarkson U. study (12/11/2005)
» Retail Mafia collaborate with Boost for boosted series Motorola i835 (12/11/2005)
(Add your comments)
Reader Comments
Version 0.8.4 on the Mac seems to have a very different interface from the Win version...
This has to be one of the most useful posts on here in a while.
Fantastic.
#1 is right. The Mac version is very different looking. Much nicer, of course, but that's the norm with Mac programs. :P
Hmm...wonder if it's possible to stream to an Xbox 360 in this way...Probably not out-of-the-box, but it would be nice to not have to purchase a MCPC to have this functionality.
Would this work on an xbox? And if so would it have to be running linux, or could it do it from a modded dashboard?
I don get the webcontrol thing to work at a mac - anyone has?
Now the trick left is to turn it around.
Real-time capture a stream off of your TV (cable box) and stream that to another computer. Then we could put SlingBox out of business.
Brian
Humm, i'm pondering on whether or not I could use the streaming media idea to watch xvid/divx on my xbox360 via media center extender (which has no xvid codec) ... which would save me from the painful conversion process to a supported format. Given the media extenders ability to play streaming formats, and its ability to run nearly any program that is hosted on the windows pc, perhaps it would work... Also it will host a website which you could navigate to for controlling the videos.
One thing I know it will do for sure is display anything you could display in IE, perhaps a full screen streaming video plugin in a webpage.
For a better front end for the remote interface for mac users I wrote a dashboard widget that makes the remote web interface a little more friendly.
http://www.autopoetic.com/vlcremote/
This is awesome, I frequently use this on my home network, but is there any way to stream it across your whole network so any computer can watch it without having to only focus it on one IP address?
Brian that can be done easily. All you have to do is go to file -> Open Capture Device instead of file -> open file.
#6: You can input from capture devices (like a TV tuner card, and probably some cable boxes with firewire) and stream that. Any capture device that works with Windows' thing works, and I think only certain capture devices work in linux.
does anybody knows if you can stream it to your PSP ?
thanks
#1 the interface is different however the options available are the same, just in different places. I am also trying this on a Mac but cannot seem to select multiple items to build a playlist to stream. I am only able to select one item. Anyone out there know how to select multiple items?
I beleive you can stream it to a Multicast address and have multiple clients listen on that same multicast address. If you aren't familiar with the concept of Multicast address they are the IP address that start with 224.0.0.x.
What about PSP? Is there any way to get this to run under homebrew? Can the 2.5 version of the PSP software that runs Sony's own LocationFree Player somehow view this stream?
I've just been playing with this over the last few days. It's a little easier if you turn on SAP Announcing as it allows for less IP messing and for dynamic clients to connect to the server: (As in you specify where you want to stream to *from the client* using the web interface, not in advance on the server.)
---
On the server:
Run VLC and enable the web interface (as shown in the tutorial above). Add all the files you want to stream into the playlist. You now want to set up VLC to announce via SAP.
Go to Settings, Preferences...
Tick the Advanced Options checkbox in the bottom right of the window, then expand "Stream output", "Sout stream" and go to Standard. Tick "SAP announcing" and fill out the "Session name" with something useful like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". (save)
On your client:
Fire up your browser and go to http://server-ip:8080
Now, in the Stream Output textbox enter udp://your-ip (e.g. udp://10.0.0.2) and click the Sout button. This tells the server to stream to your client IP.
Click on something in the playlist to start it playing.
Run VLC and go to the preferences. Expand Playlists, Service discovery and tick SAP Announcements. (save)
Notice how "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" shows up in the playlist now. Double-click to play :)
---
What would be nice is if you could use the client VLC to seek the server's stream rather than having to flip over to the web interface, anyone know if this is possible?
Cheers,
Stef
P.S. There seems to be a bug that causes the VLC webserver to increment its port sometimes (when it crashes, anyway). If you can't connect to the webserver check the server's preferences under Interface+General+HTTP and make sure the "Host address" is :8080
anyone figured out how to get the audio for videos to work through airtunes/airport express on a pc
I have some info on using it with Linux located here: http://www.brentnorris.net/vlcstreaming.html and here: http://www.brentnorris.net/vlcclient.html
Thanks for the great info! Works fine for me, but I get skips and hiccups every 10-20 seconds. Anything that could help this? I'm serving from a 300mhz B&W; G3 with 384MB RAM running Mac OS 10.4. It connects via ethernet to a D-Link DI-524 sending over 802.11g to my Powerbook (17", 1.67ghz, 1GB RAM, Airport) also running 10.4. If anyone could offer advice, I figured this was the place and the time for it.
I'm having problems doing this. I put in the IP of the computer I want to serve it to on the server, and am using the default port.
In the client, I'm putting in the servers ip, but it's not working for some reason.
Any suggestions? I'm using 2 macs running tiger
Is there a reason why this is better than orb? www.orb.com is free and you can stream all your media anywhere.
ive got it all setup as above. plays fine locally, but not when i follow instructions above to play on a clinet. when i do try to play on the client pc . the PLAY button turns into the STOP button as if its playing but screen does not appear.
also as a vid capture, ive got it to recognize my hauppauge 250 card and when i click ok, vlc opens up a "screen" but then again . nothing plays
Orb looks limited by its requirements. It needs a Windows PC.. ie, not cross platform and an Internet connection.
VLC allows you to stream media on a LAN without going out to the Internet and back. It would suck if every client on the network had to make a trip out to get to something local.
As the theme image for this post the wrong offical icon / image is used, you can get the offical image here, or in vlc.app on mac os x:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlc
Concerning Post #10: I haven't used VNC for a couple of years but last I remember you could broadcast the stream out to a network as opposed to a specific client IP. When you launched the client, it was able to search for and find the server. Not sure if this is still an available option or not.
This seems like a neat idea, but I'm curious what the benefits would be over just creating a shared drive on the network and opening the file over the network? Doesn't seem to different to me. Thanks for the post.
I don't understand why this is helpful on a LAN when you have things like samba...
I could go through all this trouble or I could just share the dang thing over my lan (as I am already doing) and open it when I want with zero hassle. Also have easily controllable permissions that way.
I suppose this is ok for streaming over the internet though, especially if you wanna transcode it.
Seems to me it'd be better if the client could just connect to a vlc server which would then tell the server where to stream to. This specifying the client to stream to business is cumbersome.
Orb and VLC are two vastly different applications. VLC is primarily a media player with network capabilities. Orb is a personal media distribution platform.
Orb may be free, but it is not "Free" You are dependent upon orb.com to use their software. If Orb.com gets shutdown by the **AA then their software is useless, oh, and all the data they collected about your media sharing is then available to whomever shut them down. Do you know the cost of defending yourself against a copyright infringement case?
VLC is much free-er than Orb in that you may continue to use it even if the videolan.org website disappears and all the developers get tired of being hippies. In fact, if you can no longer run your copy of VLC because the latest version of your OS uses a new graphics system (or any other reason,) VLC can be adapted to suit your new situation.
Wether or not you think that software freedom is "good," or whatever your stance on copyright may be, you cannot deny that VLC being free makes it more likely to survive a full frontal legal assault from content creators. And I think that is good for all of us.
#12 (AndrewNeo)
When I open capture device should my card show up somewhere? When I open up the capture device I get audio but video only shows snow (my tv program is running as well).
The main reason I could see using this is if I had a media server connected to my tv or home audio setup and wanted to stream to those devices. Instead of having to control the player directly from the pc (which might be located in a different area than the media devices) I can use the web portal to control it (from multiple web enabled devices).
The folks that keep saying "just do a file share". Look a little further into what we're talking about here. How do I make a file share of a live tv broadcast? How do I make a file share of a DVD so more than one person can use it? If serving files from a webserver or file share was good enough why would Real, Media Player or WinAmp exist? Because they serve different needs.
Sure, at the simplest level, a file share can suffice for limited users. When you try to scale things via 1:1 tcp connections you start hammering your server and the network. Multicasting is alot more efficient. Users on our network have shortcuts on their desktops for "channel 1" and "channel 2". It doesn't matter whether 1 person watches or 20 people do. We multicast the same amount of traffic.
If I only wanted to view some of my files that were on another PC in the network, I probably wouldn't setup VLC. But to have the flexiblity to share multiple types of media whether its a dvd, a live broadcast or a file to one or more client PCs, I'd use VLC.
I tried streaming from my G4 Mac over airport to my XP laptop so that I could connect to the TV via S-video and I couldn't get it working. For kicks I tried using the laptop as the server and then the Mac gets the audio but no video... is this a bandwidth issue? I am using the original airport, but nothing else is running on the network. When the Mac is the server XP can see the web interface, but if I try it the other way around the Mac can't connect to XP. I tried turning off the XP firewall and all the other virus software but still no luck. I feel like I am missing a simple sharing setting, but I am not great with Windows and am not sure where else to look. Thanks to anyone who helps me get this thing working :)
I figured it out. I just needed to click on the "refresh list" button:o
However now my system just crashes (and I now have the tv program not running when I run vlc).
I'm on a Mac here. Anyway to get VLC to play Windows Media files?
#10:
Yes, by using HTTP. Instead of selecting UDP select HTTP. Then put the streaming server's ip to the box. On the other computer select HTTP and write the adress as ip:port. That way you can also stream the same file to multiple computers.
To stream to multiple computer in a LAN you can also use multicast UDP. Select UDP as the streaming type and set to address to something in the 224.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255 range. Then just use the same ip for all computers. This way the video is only streamed once from the server no matter how many clients you play it on. To stream over the Internet you'll have to use something else. (like HTTP)
isn't there any way to serve your files without needing to create a playlist? some way to automatically add all of your media to the playlist and update it on a schedule, maybe? This is great, but you have to create a new playlist when you get new media.
what about streaming to a device other than a PC/MAC?
It would be nice to be able to stream to a mediaplayer, hooked to your TV!
RE #33: VLC Mac doesn't play Windows Media, as far as I know. From my limited experience (I avoid wmp) some AVIs use a WMP codec, and thus can not be played in VLC, while most AVIs use any of the other codecs and thus CAN be played in VLC. Your options for even playing back these relics (WMP-encoded AVI or true WMP files) appear to include only Windows Media Player for Mac, or by purchasing a $10 plugin for Quicktime. In short, VLC Mac no likey WMP and streaming is right out. No idea if you can play or stream WMP from VLC windows.
So let me get everything straight...
I can do everything with VLC that I can with Orb. But I have to stream to http and put the server's IP in their. Then I can call WMP on any internet connected PC, type in the server's IP and port and it would show the video. But it doesn't seem to work. Does VLC have to actively play the file for me to connect?
Also, can I add both Live Stream and videos from my storage and watch them interchangeably?
Nice writeup. This should be useful when it comes time to stream music all over the place for a party. :)
Nothing new here. I wrote about streaming live TV, DVDs, AVIs, etc. last year. Funny thing is when I used VNC to try and stream live TV from my home PC to my work PC it brought down my cable broadband connection which also brought down my Vonage phone line. I had to "throttle" VNC to use less bandwidth. Check it out - http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/gadgets/streaming-li…
#42: Are you nuts?! VNC is the WORST possible protocol for transmitting video over network. LOL!!!
Now the trick left is to turn it around.
Real-time capture a stream off of your TV (cable box) and stream that to another computer. Then we could put SlingBox out of business.
Brian
If you knew jack shit about videolan and bothered to read about it ro paly with ti for more than ten mintues you would see this is possible. Easily. In fact, I stream cable from my ATI TvWonder VE to my laptop when I am away, and have been since before anyone has heard of the SlingBox.
Everything works great for me, but when I have more than one video on a playlist, only the first video will have sound. Anyone know why this is?
Add your comments
Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.