I would like to watch presentations and college videos I have on my computer, from my tablet. There are almost a hundred of GB in videos, so I would like to watch them in streaming from my computer. My wife has also tons of videos so I have decided to do a kind of streaming local service to watch the videos from our tablets.

I have found an article about how to do it with Internet Information Server, but the article is relaying in an application that is not free (Expression Encoder). Since this is for home fun, I am not willing to pay, so I would like to ask for some free encoder that can do the trick.

I have no idea about streaming. Actually, I tried to hang the files directly on IIS, and the browser tried first to download some of them and some other (mp4?) got played badly, so I could not get a smooth video experience. What is missing?

What is the deal with H.264 ? Can I roll with VC-1 and play videos in my Android tablet with streaming with an acceptable quality through my WLAN home network?

Any better solution?

Thanks.