Postby markfm » 03 Apr 2004 19:50
No problem.
Check your friend's router, find out what IP address it has on the side that's connected to the Internet. For example, if it's an Earthspring account, it might have a WAN (Wide Area Network) IP address of 65.110.x.x (65.110.149.60, for instance).
Many cable routers have built-in firewalls, Network Address Translation, and other capabilities. NAT is the capability that is used if you want to "push" video, from your server to your friend's PC.
There are two basic NAT things that I work with on my own router -- Address Mapping and Virtual Server. Address Mapping is where you tell the router "Map this external Wide-Area-Network IP address to this internal LAN-side IP address". Virtual Server is a more specific NAT -- it tells the router that if there is a specific incoming TCP/UDP connection, on a specific Port number, to map the connection to a specific internal LAN IP address, on a specific port number.
Virtual Server is the kind of NAT capability that I would use, if it's available.
For example, if your friend's actual PC has an IP address of 192.168.2.30 (the actual IP address of the card in his/her PC), you would look at the router for the area to configure NAT, and set up a virtual server NAT mapping:
connect incoming connections to port 1234 (the default VLC port) to internal LAN IP address 192.168.2.30 Port 1234.
Then, on your side, the actual VLC server, you would launch a VLC UDP streaming session to 65.110.149.60 The router, the thing with the actual 65.110.149.60 (whatever address the ISP has assigned to it) address, will automatically pass-through the incoming connection on port 1234 to your friend's PC.
At your friend's PC, they would launch VLC, select connect to network stream, check the first UDP box (the one with no room to type in an address), and click OK.