Most devices will give you the latest frame on a read essentially. VLC accepts a tcp:// address and interpreted it correctly somehow. The raw bandwidth on the potato 320x240 or whatever was peanuts, but even if you didn't get all the frames per second the device will discard old frames and you got the latest frame anyway. So pretty cool indeed. Doesn't really multicast though. For that I suppose you could netcat to local multicast address and then connected to that same address, but I've never tried it. VLC may not receive the headers that a read may open with would be my suspicion