QuickTime
QuickTime Player is developed by Apple and is the default player on any Mac OS system. There is also a version available for Windows. It is a pretty nice player with all the basic functions for playing and streaming in place. It is very extendible 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.
Compatability
VLC has a problem understanding certain types of streamed .mov files. If a file can be played in QuickTime Player 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.
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 player on windows machines.
For more information, see VideoLAN's Official Documentation
