For the entirety of my time with Air PlayIt, I was begging it to just work, but it squashed my hopes at every turn. I'm a big fan of the phrase, "It just works," as a response to those who question why I prefer Apple products over the competition, and the same holds true when it comes to apps. But as I was reading a forum topic on Air PlayIt - which, for the record, has plenty of extremely positive reviews on the App Store, so maybe I'm just cursed - a user suggested trying Air Video HD. It was around this time that I began to feel the jaded "this is all a bunch of crap" attitude that had led me to abandon my search for a streaming solution a year or two ago. I even halved the resolution of my already not-at-all-HD video in the hopes that it could handle the load, but it was all for naught. I then began troubleshooting, which led me to investigate both my Windows firewall and a list of ports accessed via the command prompt to ensure my router's ports were functioning as intended (all of which checked out fine). I followed the setup instructions for Air PlayIt to the letter, including opening up ports on my router, and after an initial buffering period, which lasted up to 30 seconds, the most it offered me was 10 or 15 seconds of video playback before it had to stop and buffer once again. There are two components to both Air Video HD and Air PlayIt: a server application that needs to be running on the host computer and an app you download from the App Store to your iOS device. But before I get into how flawlessly Air Video HD has worked for me, I first want to bring up a different streaming app called Air PlayIt. Today I was determined to find out if things had changed, and it only took a couple of tries to find the app of my dreams in the form of Air Video HD. At some point, I just accepted that I'd never live in a world where I could watch all my PC-stored video anywhere in my home via my iPad. Usually they crash every few minutes, horribly downscale my content or fail to work at all. Sure, I know that there are plenty of remote streaming apps out there, but I've always had terrible luck getting them to work. Ideally, I'd love to have all of my favorite movies and TV shows - which are currently stored on a Windows desktop - available on my tablet at a moment's notice, but for a long time I didn't think this was a reasonable demand. Sweet.I have a problem: There just isn't enough room on my iPad to hold all of my beloved video content. With Air Video, I can keep them on my Mac and stream them to my bed. I have a 64GB 3G iPad on order from the US, but even with all that space there's no way I want to convert the TV shows downloads daily. The internet streaming in a neat gimmick, but the real magic is in the live conversion. Air Video costs just $3, and there is a full-featured free version that shows only a subsection of the movies in each folder. Poor connections may be more noticeable on the iPad's bigger screen.ĭo I sound impressed? I am. The app automatically adapts the video stream's quality to the available bandwidth. The lag is a little longer before the movie begins, but in under 20 seconds, I was watching a glitch-free movie, streamed from my home. To connect when outside, you need to enter a PIN and the app will take care of the rest. If not, you'll need to punch a hole in your firewall first. If you have a UPnP-enabled router, this involves setting an optional password. You need to configure the server to allow connections from the outside world (for home network use, no configuration is required). I don't have an iPad yet for 3G testing, but I do have a new MiFi with a 3G card inside, so when I left the house last night I left my MacBook running. The only files it can't work with are videos with DRM. If you already started watching the move, Air Video even remembers and lets you choose whether to play from where you left off, or to start over. This killer feature means that you don't need to do any tedious, lengthy ripping of your files just to play them on the iPad. Just tap "Play with Live Conversion" and your computer will start to convert the movie and - after a few seconds - send out a compatible stream. Air Video will convert these files on the fly so they're playable on the iPad and iPhone. But wait, you say: What about all my ripped AVI files, and my BitTorrented DIVX movies? This is where the magic comes in.
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