Streaming webcam using VLC

VLC is definitely more than just a video player. It has lot of interesting features and extensions which are not explored by all. By enabling one of its various input interfaces, it is even possible to program against your VLC player -- I had written a clip-list application quite sometime back that automatically directs vlc player to play only portions of a given video (maybe a post later).

I'm not really interested in streaming my webcam but this was actually useful for me for a different reason. I actually started writing a post on that, and felt that this topic is worth a post by itself -- some people might just want to stream webcam.

It's pretty simple.

1. Start VLC (all my instructions/snapshots will be as of vlc 0.9.6).
2. Before proceeding further, let us open the VLC's console, so we know if there is any error during the process. To open the console, Menu: Tools -> Add Interface -> Console. VLC will throw log messages into this console.
3. Menu: Media->Stream (or ctrl -S)
4. Choose the 'Capture Device' tab (btw, you can stream a video/audio file/DVD using the appropriate tabs)
5. Under the 'Video device name' drop down choose your camera (you can even stream your desktop by choosing it in 'Capture Mode').
6. Click on Stream. A new window pops up. This is where you provide the streaming options.
   
   
   
   
7. A simple method is to stream over HTTP -- this specially helps to get across firewalls/networks without glitch. Provide the IP address of the interface in which you want to stream your video. Eg., if you have a multi-homed computer, you might want to bind it only to your private network and not your internet IP. Choose an appropriate port of your choice. Even 80 would do.
8. Under Profile, choose Windows (wmv/asf) -- If you understand, you can opt to choose the right profile as you see fit.
   
   
   
   
9. Now click on stream and your video should start streaming. If everything was fine, you should see a 'creating httpd' message in the console without any other relevant error messages following it (sometimes you might not have an appropriate encoder or the port binding might fail etc.,). Also the VLC player UI's status pane should show 'Streaming'.

That's it. Now to view the streaming video on any other machine in the network,

1. open VLC on any other machine
2. Menu: open Network (or control - N)
3. Select HTTP in protocol and the IP address of the machine where you are streaming. The port number stays disabled for me (Workaround: change the protocol to RTP, change the port and change the protocol back to HTTP :) )
4. Click on Play.