But I still like the iTunes style categorization of Mezzmo!ġ. It does, however, offer some interesting features, such as on-the-fly conversion on your computer so the iPad doesn’t have to do so much work, and individual settings for quality, resolution, and zoom for each video.Just got an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy SII LTE), but migrating from AirVideo and Servetome experiences on iOS hasn't been as straightforward as I thought. Air Video supports MP4, M4V, MOV, AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, MPEG, MKV, 3GP, DMF, DIVX, and FLV formats (and, like StreamToMe, doesn’t play protected iTunes Store videos). Like ServeToMe, it lets you choose shared folders, but also lets you add iTunes playlists, though this feature is buggy. The Air Video interface on the iPad offers more options than StreamToMe.Air Video uses a program calledĪir Video Server, which only works for videos. For music, it plays MP3s, unprotected AACs, and FLAC files. However, as far as videos are concerned, it plays all the main video formats (including some that iTunes can’t): MP4, AVI, MOV, FLV, MPG, MKV, and WMV. If you play one song, the program stops afterwards and awaits your next selection. You can’t choose playlists, and you can’t even play the contents of a folder. StreamToMe is good for video-though it can’t stream protected video files from the iTunes Store-but not so much for music. On the iPad, you open the StreamToMe app, tap the name of the computer you’re sharing with, then navigate through its folders to find the content you want to stream. ServeToMe application, launch it, choose which folders to share, then just leave it running. You can share your entire hard drive, just your Music and Movies folders, or a specific folder of your choosing-the last option ideal, for example, to set up a limited selection of videos for a child who’s going to be watching on the iPad. It also shows active streams.īoth apps require free companion applications that you need to download from the developers’ Websites and install on your computer. The ServeToMe application is where you define shared folders. Both originated on the iPhone and iPod touch and have been updated as universal iPhone OS apps. Two $3 iPad apps provide this functionality, in similar fashion, by creating a local server on a computer (Mac or Windows) and an app on the iPad to play the music or video: Matthew Gallagher’sĪir Video Free version that limits the number of displayed items in each folder). So while this is a good idea if you just want to use the iPad as, say, a speaker when you’re listening to music in the kitchen, it’s a bit limited for serious usage.īut streaming both music and video is clearly something that interests developers. You’re limited, though, to streaming from your Mac (from iTunes or any other similar app), and you can’t choose what to listen to from the iPad itself. In a recent article, in conjunction with the company’s freeĪirfoil Speakers app (while not yet optimized for the iPad, you can run it in a small window or pixel-doubled mode). You can use Rogue Amoeba’s $25Īirfoil ( ), the latest version of which I discussed As the saying goes, there’s an app for that-more than one, actually, although they’re far from perfect.įor starters, there’s what you might called “passive” streaming of music from an iTunes library to the iPad. Or you may want to watch a movie stored on your Mac. You may want to stream music to listen to while you’re reading a book, without having to worry exactly what music you last added from your plentiful iTunes library to the iPad. Given that the iPad doesn’t have a great deal of capacity-especially in the 16GB entry-level models-the ability to stream could come in handy. But Apple left this functionality out of the iPad, treating it more like a mobile device than the replacement for a laptop that it will become in many homes.
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