Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.

UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.

With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.

Image you wanted to take some audio, let us say iTunes and whatever is playing send it to the internet so that other people including you can pick this up in Media Player, WinAmp or any muic player capable of streaming? Well this is what Nicecast does in a nice and simple way. Quite simply you select the application yo want the Audio taken from and set the various options such as Stream name etc. Once you press “On Air” it takes care of your Router if it support uPNP (or you just forward port 8000 if not) and even gives your the URL along with the option of testing it for port forwarding.

I left it at the default Quality of 128kbit, Stereo and so forth and it allowed 2 people to listen in decent stereo on my upload I get from Virgin (which I think is 512k). I see this as easier then starting a stream on Ustream for example (less programs to run) and of course I can dedicate more bandwidth to the Audio which is the goal. The Price is $40 which is basically about £20 and worth it, any upgrades are free and the program is stable. I suggest taking a look at Rogue Amoeba Site for there other programs as well if you own a Mac, some nice programs including the free one such as Volume Control and Line In Program.