Quoted from: http://www.videolan.org/

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The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-platform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux...

For more information about what features are supported on your operating system, please see the full features list.

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Overview of the VideoLAN streaming solution

The VideoLAN streaming solution includes:

• VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client), which can be used as a server to stream MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 / DivX files, DVDs and live videos on the network in unicast or multicast; or used as a client to receive, decode and display MPEG streams under multiple operating systems,
• VLS (VideoLAN Server), which can stream MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on the network in unicast or multicast. Most of the VLS functionality can now be found in the much better VLC program. Usage of VLC instead of VLS is advised.

VLC media player is a cross-platform media player and server. It works under Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, *BSD, Solaris, Familiar Linux and QNX. For more information on VLC, please see the VLC features page.

VLS is a dedicated server that compiles under Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It isn't under very active development at the moment and we advice you to consider the Stream Output functionality of VLC instead. For more information on VLC's stream output and VLS, see the streaming features page.

The network on which you setup the VideoLAN solution can be as small as one ethernet 10/100Mb switch or hub, and as big as the whole Internet! The bandwidth needed is:

• 0.5 to 4 Mbit/s for an MPEG-4 stream,
• 3 to 4 Mbit/s for an MPEG-2 stream read from a satellite card, a digital terrestial television card or an MPEG-2 encoding card,
• 6 to 9 Mbit/s for a DVD.

You can add a channel information service based on the SAP/SDP standard to the VideoLAN solution. The mini-SAP-server sends announces about the multicast programs on the network, and VLCs receive these annouces and automatically adds the programs announced to their playlist. The mini-SAP-server works under Linux and Mac OS X. If you have only a single VLC server, you can also use the SAP announcer, that is incorperated into VLC.

The VideoLAN streaming solution has a full IPv6 support !