QuickTime
QuickTime is developed by Apple and is the default player on any macOS system. There was a version available for Windows, but support was dropped in 2016. It is a pretty nice player with all the basic functions for playing and streaming in place. It is very extensible by use of plugins.
QuickTime comes in a standard (free) version, or as QuickTime Pro, which enables additional (basic) video editing capabilities and allows you to export video into different codecs.
Compatibility
VLC media player has a problem understanding certain types of streamed .mov files (the native format for QuickTime). If a file can be played in QuickTime and not VLC, open it in QuickTime and let it decide which datarate is best for your connection, then pause it and open the stream info. You should then be able to copy the link and open it in VLC.
compatible with, .avi
A sample of how to stream from v4l source to quicktime player
The following command is an example of streaming from Video4Linux to QuickTime (player):
% vlc -vvv --intf dummy v4l:/dev/video0:norm=pal:frequency=37525:size=720x576:channel=0:adev=/dev/sound/audio:audio=0 --sout '#transcode{acodec=mp4a, vcodec=mp4v,vb=2000,ab=128,vt=800000,keyint=80}:rtp{dst=239.2.12.42,port=1234, sdp=http:/myserver.dot.com:8082/tv.sdp}'
You need VLC and FFmpeg compiled with faad2 library. I have tested it with vlc-0.7.2 on both side client and server on Linux and QuickTime on Windows machines.
