Watching video on a LAN

[Donn]

Yo,
We have a small network at home. At the moment I watch vids on a notebook* via 
Firefox which is being served by a web-server on the main machine.

* Ubuntu Netbook Remix Jaunty is installed.

This leaves the video playing up to Firefox and it's various (confusing) 
plugins. Some videos work, many do not (in divers exotic ways.)
Also, FF tends to crash -- prob. the plugin's fault. I don't care, it's still 
a mess.

When I copy and paste the URL into VLC player -- the results are much better. 
Videos tend to play well. 

The manual process of finding the link in Firefox, copy, switch to VLC, open a 
menu, paste the URL is too tedious. (Not to mention too complex for others in 
the family!)

Is there any other means to browse a restricted location on another machine, 
click a video link and have VLC (or other) player open and *stream* that 
video?

(I don't want to copy the video across before it plays. It must stream.)

I am having horrible thoughts of trying to write some solution in Python -- 
but before I start coding and lose sight of the next six months, I thought I'd 
ask here :)

\d