I love the nofadz stream for the weekend live riffs, and the justin.tv stream for my iPhone, but I wanted my own stream that could handle my avi collection which includes specials and play a stream at a decent LAN bandwidth, and therefore higher audio and visual quality. After about a day of goofing around with VLC, here's how to do it (assuming linux or unix. Command lines should be the same for windows, but the paths will be different)

You need:

• a computer to stream from (server) and a computer to stream to (client). In theory, they could be the same box, but it gets more complicated.
• VLC on both boxes
• a collection of MST3K movies on the server (or connected via samba or NFS). You can also do this with other video files or shows, but this is /r/MST3K! My files are in .avi format. Create a playlist of your files in .m3u format which will be used in the command line below. The beauty of this whole adventure is that you don't have to encode your files into a different format!! That takes time and disc space - VLC does it on the fly.

So, my server is a mac mini with VLC installed. The command line to launch everything is this:

/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC /Users/cambot/MST3K.m3u --loop --random --sout-keep --sout '#gather:std{mux=asf,dst=192.168.0.4:8888,access=mmsh}'

1. The first argument is the path to VLC. Replace it with yours.
2. The second argument is the path to your playlist (.m3u) file.
3. the --loop and --random flags just tell VLC to randomize the playlist and play it forever, just like nofadz and justin.tv. You can omit these if you want.
4. --sout-keep tells VLC to play all tracks in 1 stream. Without this flag, your client will stop playing after 1 track has finished, and you'll have to press play after each track.
5. The last argument in single quotes tells the VLC server how to stream the video. Replace the IP address with your server's IP address and port. I use port 8888 because 8080 (the default) is already in use for VLC http interface. You don't have to bother with the other stuff.

So now, on your client, launch VLC, and File -> Open Network, and enter mmsh://YourIP:Yourport. In my example, this is mmsh://192.168.0.4:8888.

Voila. Infinite high quality MST3K on your LAN. I use it mostly for when I work out and do chores. You could also share this with others on your LAN or access it from the internet with SSH port forwarding. Have fun, and please comment if you have more ideas!

This is just a quick and dirty way. I'm pretty sure that nofadz uses a shoutcast server. I'm not that fancy, so suggestions are welcome!

POST SPAM FILTER RESCUE UPDATE

I've since transferred the stream from my mac mini to my always-on freebsd server to save electricity. I added this script in my home directory which does everything above, but runs it as a daemon and adds the http interface that I can access via the VLC remote iphone app. You can use the no-x version of vlc too. freebsd users enjoy!

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/bin/vlc /home/cambot/MST3K.m3u --syslog --extraintf http --daemon --random --loop --sout-keep --sout '#gather:std{mux=asf,dst=192.168.0.252:8888,access=mmsh}'