Last week I redeemed 170,000 Sony points to get a Sony VAIO RA920G PC running Microsoft's Media Center Edition 2005 operating system. I was curious if I could figure out a way to "stream" my home PC's multimedia content, including My Videos (.AVI, .Divx, etc), as well as stream live TV to my PC at work by accessing the TV tuner capture card. Imagine being able to remotely control your home television and view the content at work! Now that would be cool... And so I began my investigation and research.

First, let me point out that apparently, I am not the only one desiring the ability to stream MCE 2005's content. I've read several forum posts stating the same thing. The general consensus is that Microsoft didn't put streaming capabiltiies into MCE 2005 as to avoid running afoul of the DMCA/RIAA/MPAA and getting tangled up in copyright issues.

Why does Hollywood always have to ruin all the fun? It's not like my home broadband connection has the bandwidth to stream to hundreds of users. In fact, I had issues having enough upstream bandwidth on my home cable connection to stream to just ONE PC - I will get into that bandwidth issue in a minute.

In my initial research, I could not find any software that would stream video files or access a TV tuner card and stream that. I wanted something that could also transcode on the fly so I could reduce

the video quality if need be for slower Internet connections. I was about to give up and all seemed lost when I came upon VideoLAN, which has a multimedia player that also acts as a streaming server with transcoding capabilities. Best of all, it's open-source and runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, and more! Could this be it? I frantically read the home page, quickly searched for the download link and installed the software.

I first tried streaming a file on the LAN rather than the Internet (WAN). From VLC media player I opened an episode of Smallville that I had recorded and encoded as an .AVI file.

Fig 1. VLC Media Player with Smallville playing

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