Here's an alternative way to stream media instead
of using something like vlc which, incidentally,
there's certainly nothing wrong with. It is, in
fact, a wonderful program. This is just another
way.

On your streaming client, type this first.

$ nc -l 1234 | mplayer -cache 8192 -

Then walk to your streaming server and push the file
down the network's throat.

Filename is just an example.

$ cat Aerosmith-Amazing.mpg | nc 192.168.1.5 1234

If the streaming client IP is 192.168.1.5...

That is all. It works. Really cool. :)