Easiest way to stream videos from my server?
use ssh -X with xauth, and run vlc on the server. It's fairly easy to stream videos using vlc. Howver this solution uses too much bandwidth to be usable.
What you should use instead is a network filesystem, just hit ctrl-l in nautilus, and then type sftp://user@my-server:port/folder and open up your movies directly off the server. This will use some cpu on both the server and client for the encryption, if that is a problem you can set up NFS.