This article descibes how you can stream video from any media file - or even your webcam - to your mobile phone. The article concerns video only, not audio although a similar procedure can be achieved for audio.

Two free, open source, cross platform tools are beeing used for this purpose:

• VideoLan
• Darwin Streaming Server

Videolan can be found in the following url http://www.videolan.org/ It's installation procedure is quite straitforward

Darwin Streaming server can be found here: http://developer.apple.com/opensource/server/streaming/index.html In order to install and use Darwin Perl is needed. Note for Windows user, in order to execute streamingadminserver.pl you have to use perlX.X.X.exe (where X.X.X is the version number) and not perl.exe

The steps in order to achieve the streaming are the following:

• Start Darwin Streamin Server. It will be very helpful in this step to check if the server has been started successfully by trying to view one the sample movies shipped with the server
• Start videolan using the following command (one line)

vlc -I dummy FILE_NAME --no-audio --sout
"#transcode{vcodec=H263,width=176,height=144,vb=28,fps="12.5"}
:rtp{dst=SERVER_IP,sdp=file://PATH_TO_MOVIES_DIRECTORY\stream.sdp}"

FILE_NAME is the name of the file you would like to stream
SERVER_IP is the ip address where DArwin Streaming Server is located
PATH_TO_MOVIES_DIRECTORY is the path where Darwin Streaming Server stores the movies to stream. The default path for windows is C:\Program Files\Darwin Streaming Server\movies and for linux /usr/local/movies

Now on your mobile phone's broswer enter the following adress rtsp://SERVER_IP/stream.sdp