3 Streaming Applications to Have Fun With in Office

Wouldn’t you want to have your own radio channel? Play DJ to a couple of friends, and garner a great deal of attention in your office or on your local LAN network in your building etc. Or simply broadcast your music online to anyone and everyone. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? It’s fairly simple too. You just need the right software that works for you, and you need an interesting music database for others liking. We’ll list three applications that we think are worth a try.
VLC

Publisher: Opensource
Download Link: 1
Size: 9420.2 kb

You might be surprised to see VLC being included in this lineup. VLC better known as being the Swiss army knife of media players also comes with a very comprehensive streaming engine. Not only is it capable of simple audio/visual streaming, it offers some very comprehensive options for the power users to customize the streaming experience to their hearts content.

To stream using VLC, all one has to do is make a playlist using your favorite media player or a playlist maker. Then from VLC from under file open Wizard, click stream to network. From here select existing playlist and click on next. This will bring you to the screen you see above.

From here select HTTP. Leave the tab below blank. Click the next button and you will be on encapsulation tab. Here from the various options select, RAW and click next. Here you can set the TTL option or simply skip over it. That’s it. Your audio streaming is ready. For anyone who wishes to access your audio stream, all they have to do is use http://yourip:8080. This can be directly from any modern player like Winamp or WMP.
Potaro

Publisher: Potaro
Download Link: 1
Size: 17459 kb

Potaro, in simple terms, is an application for streaming audio and video content over your local network or over the internet. You just need to install, register and direct the application towards the folder that has all the media content (music and/or videos). It has a built in web server that allows you to play your content. It works on the ‘mms’ protocol, and anyone can stream in using either Windows Media Player or Winamp.

Once your library has been built, all you need is to log into the server and start playing. For others to be able to stream all they need is url. Your IP + the port (in this case, 22222) needs to be opened using the Open URL tab in the file menu of any player. For eg: mms://IPaddress:22222/ . So all you need is a JavaScript enabled web browser, Windows Media Player, and a broadband connection at your remote location.

The player also allows you to stream into the broadcast channel yourself. The library can be sorted as per Artists, Genres etc, and the application also recognizes m3u or pls playlist. It also allows you to either allow or block people accessing your stream. You can even broadcast your webcam footage online to your friends. And you can monitor the log through the log viewer.

Vibe Streamer

Publisher: Version Studio
Download Link: 1
Size: 661 kb

If you don’t want to manually keep feeding the songs into playlist, and simply want your friends to be able to access your music and play it, Vibe Streamer should do the trick. You just need to create accounts of people you want to allow access to your music. This is simple! After installing you need to click on ‘Users and Groups’ and add a user. You create a Username and password, and pass it on to the person.

This is a web browser enabled streaming system, wherein your friend can simply type the path in any browser and enter after verification. That user will now have access to the shared folder and can listen to anything he likes through the inbuilt player itself.

In this case, the port used to stream information is ‘8081’. And streaming takes place through the http:// protocol. For eg: http://IPaddress:8081.