How do you stream videos from an ftp

I've just set up an ftp on my computer and am just using it to share files between the computers in the house connected by the wireless routers. I am using xp but haven't set up any network options or anything, I am just using serv-u. I can access the ftp from the other computers and download the files manually and then watch them, but this sometimes takes 5 to 10 minutes and I'd like to be able to just stream them so I can watch them as they download. Is this possible with regular divx and xvid avi files, or do es it need to be some special streaming format. I try copying the address of the files and opening them as a link in media player classic and zoom player, but even then they don't start playing until the whole file has downloaded.

I'm sure when I was at university we could stream video files from an ftp this guy had set up, so I think it's possible. Does anyone know how?

If you're not serving this content outside of your local LAN, why would you *want* to use FTP to stream video? FTP is rather slow when it comes to file transfers.

If I were you, I'd skip FTP and setup a share that you can access from your network. It'd be more transparent than using an FTP server and you could set it up so you don't even need to logon to access the files. Not sure which OS you are using, but it's a fairly trivial task on most OS's.