I went into the Stream Settings screen (See Fig. 2 below) and set the file to stream using UDP on port 1234 to the IP address of a 2nd PC. I could have used either multicast (for multiple PCs) or unicast to stream the video. For my first test I didn't want to get greedy by trying to stream to multiple PCs so I chose the unicast option.

Fig 2. Streaming Output Window

Next, on this 2nd PC I installed the VLC media player. Then I simply clicked on Open Network Stream, chose UDP port 1234 (the default) and clicked OK as shown in this Fig 3. screenshot:

Fig 3. Network Streaming Window

Almost immediately Smallville started playing on this 2nd PC. Good stuff!

Next, I attempted to duplicate these results using the Internet. I had one PC setup to use one broadband connection (T1 line) and another PC setup

to use a different broadband connection (2nd T1 line). I then repeated the above steps and once again was able to see Smallville play. The quality was actually quite good, but it did have some artifacts and break-ups due to Internet congestion. I decided to reduce the quality of the video from 1024kbps to 512kbps and the artifacts and "hiccups" all but disappeared! Even with the transcoder reducing the video quality, the video quality was pretty good.

VLC media player has some other tricks up its sleeve. You can stream a DVD across a network connection. Yeah, that's right, you read that correctly. Stream a DVD using an IP network! Now this I had to try. Once again I repeated the above steps, except instead of opening a file, VLC has a menu option to open a DVD. I inserted my wedding DVD, because if I inserted a commercial DVD and used VLC media player's libdvdcss library to read the commerical DVD I might run afoul of the DMCA since this library has the capability of disregarding the DVD's region/zone. All regions are supported without any constraint, which is probably against the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). And since I don't want any trouble with the DMCA, I'll just use my own DVD thank you very much. (Shhhh.. it does work with commerical DVDs but I didn't tell you that.)

In any event, I was able to stream the DVD across two broadband Internet connections with very good video and audio quality. I did once again have to reduce the kbps from 1024 to 512 or 384kbps to prevent congestion though, which slightly degraded the quality. But hey, I was watching a DVD across the Internet. Is that cool or what?