VideoLan Tutorial

As far as marketing goes I think this article might one day bring a little 'I hate to teach some' idiot to build online infomercials, but I assure you my motives are much less laborious.

If you live outside of North America, like me, you might think watching your favorite TV provider back home was impossible. In fact, for years I thought I was stuck with crap TV and download LimeWire. Trailerpark Boys, Battlestar Gallactica, and Family Guy had become pleasures I relied on friends to send me by mail, years after they aired. Until now ...

I've been toying with this all day and tell VLC (www.videolan.org) is one of the most interesting open source software I've encountered in some time. The platform support is universal from Win32, Unix, BeOS also long dead. These are also the people behind Google Video if this is any indication. VLC can stream video online, multicast, save incoming streams, and do all sorts of interesting things only people with a lot of money should be able to do - how to open your own TV station. The quality is really amazing and of course, infinitely changeable. Oh ya and did I mention that it's completely free? Ok I did, then ...

I tried VLC getting a friend to stream DISH Network to me by the United States and was very watchable. Keep in mind this was streaming from Seattle, WA to Bangkok, TH. 18 hops.

Stream using a video capture card

What you need:

- Operating System
- 1 video capture card
- Drivers for video capture card (driversguide.com go to find the driver software for video capture cards)
- DirectX 9.0c
- VLC (please get the nightly CVS version, a lot of good people working hard on this software, and please donate to them if you can)
- A network connection
- Windows Media Player
- Lots of patience

Step 1

- Install capture card (I use all ATI Wonder cards and have no problem)

- Install or update DirectX (windowsupdate.com)

- Install VLC

Step 2 FOR NAT (using DHCP for home networks) / DSL / Cable Router

- Go to your router and click on Port Forwarding

- Enter the IP address of the server of VLC and the desired port for forwarding.

- The router should accept the setting and tell you everything is ok

Step 3

- Focus on VLC
- Go to File Open Captue Device> Video> Device Name> Refresh .. (Wait a minute) click on the taskbar by default and then click on the capture device driver (the one supplied with the card)
- Now click Stream / Save> Settings
- Click on Play at local and MMSH. Enter your local IP address and port you want (for people using NAT thats 192.xxx that you sent to your router before)
- Click on Video Codec Video Codec and select the format (WMV I use since I'm using WMP), then select a good bit rate 'as 192 or 128, then select the image size in your player (1 - 2)
- Repeat the instructions above for audio
- A VERY IMPORTANT quality setting is TTL - Type 10 to a minimum. This tells VLC the number of routers the flow may pass through.
- Click OK and click OK to start the flow

Step 4

- Open WMP and click on File> Open URL

- Type http://:9494

- Your video will be a while 'to the buffer, but then you should see the pictures .......