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. 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.