The VideoLAN Forums

When I select VLC's http streaming option, is it really streaming, or using progressive download similar to what a web server would provide? If it's progressive download, then is there any advantage over a plain web server?

From what I've read, streaming offers the following main benefits:

- ability to seek without downloading the whole file
- doesn't save video in hard drive cache, preventing copying
- handles live video

I'm not able to seek with VLC, so it doesn't look like true streaming, but I'm not quite sure.

VLC is doing real-time streaming. If you want to do progressive download, then you must use a normal web server because VLC does not support it. As you say, it would quite pointless to implement it anyway, as web servers are better suited to that task.