I want to broadcast movies, music, and stuff from my linux server to anywhere in my lan. I want the server to broadcast this on a webpage so anyone in my lan can go to the specified address and watch it. I know this can be done very easily by installing a ftp server. I'm mainly doing this to watch movies from my laptop. This laptop however is from work and I cannot install anything on it nor can I transfer anything non work related. Thus, I won't be able to watch divx or mpeg4 clips from this laptop since it doesn't have the codecs and I cannot install them. Is there any linux software that basically broadcasts the video in flash or some "universal" codec? A good example implementation is google video. All one needs is macromedia flash and they are good to go.

Try VLC http://www.videolan.org/ , it's specifacally made for LAN streaming.