VLC

Official VLC website

Windows media machine
If you're often streaming video over your LAN, you might find yourself adding the same network options into VLC every time you play it. In windows, you can resolve this by creating a shortcut to VLC on the your Desktop. If you right click on the icon, you will notice the full path to the Vlc.exe is surrounded by quotes after "Target:". Leave it like that, but now enter the commandline options you were choosing before, and click apply. In my example, I added:

--fullscreen --file-caching=1200 http://192.168.1.25:8080

so it now pulls down the http stream from my 192.168.1.25 machine, caching for 1200 milliseconds and playing it in fullscreen mode.

The interesting thing is that even though we start it with --fullscreen, it opens in regular mode and quickly switches to fullscreen. There have been times where the video started in that short "regular mode" time, and although the VLC screen switched to full screen, the video was only playing in the top left quarter of the screen. To resolve this, simply hit ESC to leave full screen mode, and then go back into full screen mode (under "Video" at the top when a video is playing).