I know that this is a basic question, and I'm aware of a similar one, but that answer does not appear to be evergreen - it's a simple link which says that VLC can do it, with no other explanation of the 'how'.
In short, I have a large collection of ripped DVDs on my desktop PC (stored in the living room). My wife has a laptop which she uses while taking care of the kids. We'd like to be able to stream some of the DVDs to the laptop when they're in the kid's room. We've found that when they're getting tired and cranky, but it's not yet naptime, a 20 minute Backyardigan's episode (or Barney, or Wonderpets, or whatever) can help keep the peace.
We'd like to be able to access our full library, but it doesn't seem to make sense to me to have that data duplicated to both machines, and the laptop's hard drive just doesn't have the same space the desktop does.
Can someone point me to a better resource than the other question provided? It's also worth noting that I would prefer a solution which can also stream subtitles for our ripped DVDs - my wife is slowly losing her hearing, and subtitles are a huge help for her.