FWIW, and with *all* due respect - I think your post here is a bit gratuitous and somewhat shortsighted. I can only use myself as an example, but I do know several other people working with Internet2 in academic institutions here in the USA that would certainly not agree with you, and who, although fairly knowledgeable, have also had major issues trying to get VLC to work as it can.
Several of us have, and continue to try to use VLC for streaming in different situations, but - even in multicast environments with no need to worry about server software - it can be very hard to achieve a successful setup using the GUI or wizard - without knowing how to "program" VLC - which, frankly, none of us have the time to learn to do. Most of the people working on providing multicast events are *not* in the world of computing or networking or programming - but in the world of performing arts, business, medicine, etc... There are very few VLC "real-world" examples in the documentation that I have found so far - a step-by-step FAQ would be really helpful for different realistic scenarios, including which codecs to use where, etc...
The Wiki, for instance, does mention the serious limitations for "real-world" internet Multicast - but the documentation, as far as I could see, doesn't. Something as "small" as this can (and has) led many people to waste a LOT of time trying to make VLC stream over the internet before learning (or finally just giving up) that it cannot be done unless you are on MBone enabled networks, with MCast enabled routers everywhere en route. Let alone knowing which routers (in the case of home systems) would allow them to setup even an internal MCast setup.
Personally, I have been trying to use VLC for quite a while, and although it is obviously a very powerful program, it is a *very* difficult program to master, specially if one is not acustomed to programs as "low level" as this. Having recently spent many hours over many days researching open-source streaming solutions, and having poured over the posts here in the forum on the issues of streaming, I have to say that so far, although I saw some questions answered, a lot of them were not - or were answered in ways that a newbie wouldn't be able to understand, or which created more questions than answers.
This is coming from someone who, although not a computer professional, has had over 30 years of experience in the field, worked with the university's IT department to help implement multicast and outside-firewall I2 connections, has worked with Adobe Premiere and the like for many years, is a recording producer/engineer, has produced many CDs and DVDs, runs two networks at home (wired/wireless), has deployed several VPNs and designed several websites. And yes, I do get confused sometimes with streaming issues, and have to say that VLC is one of the most complicated and user-unfriendly programs I use on a regular basis.
The experimentation required with VLC to figure out if a given setup will work given a certain processor/computer/horsepower configuration has been quite frustrating, without having some firm yardstick or clear guidlines as to how it is
supposed to perform, and what can it *really* do in real-life scenarios. Maybe it might be wise to open up a section on the forum where people might post what they are *
successfully* doing with VLC, and what equipment/setup/configuration options they have used to achieve that, as well as performance limitations/considerations. That way, I think you would have fewer questions here and/or could easily point to real-world examples, which would make anyone better understand what this extremelly complex, wonderful little program can do. If someone wants to "stream over the net", they could go there to quickly find out about issues such as unicast, multicast, streaming over webservers and streaming media servers - which are all things that successful users have been using VLC for - and basically also find out how they did it.
CG
I find most people want to jump to the end without starting at the beginning. You know, like does the file play? before you think about transcoding or streaming?
Have you learned to transcode into compatible formats and proved it before jumping into streaming? Have you discovered which containers are more applicable for streaming? Have you tried to stream locally before trying to jump onto the Internet?
Streaming is the end result of the learning process and certainly not a good place to start for beginners. VLC is a tool and it can be a good tool in the hands of someone that knows how to use it or it can be very frustrating for someone who doesn't. But this seems to be true about everything in life!
Most of the people that are here have some kind of hardware or operating system problem that is keeping VLC from working properly. Unfortunately, the descriptions they offer are less than informative and more often than not exclude the machine type (CPU & GPU), the version of VLC, even the version of the operating system. When you add to this formula, peer to peer networks as a source with the possibility of corrupted files, miss labeled files and the RIAA that has assigned some 30 - 35 machines dedicated to take down the networks, the source is becoming more and more the problem. Add to this the possibility of bad or improper encoding and you have a recipe for trouble.
When the end user wants to disregard all of this and just use there system without learning to do so is like trying to get on the Internet today with out any kind of protection and saying all I want to do is read my email but I don't understand why my computer keeps dying.
I was starting the telnet service and trying to use the console. Boy, you'd think that using telnet everyday would have rung some bells earlier.