True, you need to be carrying an iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch. Air Video is an app for Apple iOS-based devices.
Air Video will stream videos from your Mac or PC to your iDevice. The videos can be in almost any format: .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .avi, .wmv, .asf, .mpg, .mpeg, .mkv, .3gp, .dmf, .divx, .flv. So if your video file has any of those geeky abbreviations as its filename extension, Air Video will probably play it.
The secret formula is that Air Video will do "live conversion" of videos in formats which the iDevice can't ordinarily play. For example, an iPhone can't play an .mpg video ... but Air Video can!
Air Video will not play DRM-protected videos that you buy at the iTunes Store. To play one of those, Air Video will ask you if you want to open it in Safari on your iDevice. If you agree, the video will play in your iDevice's version of Apple's QuickTime engine. This happens courtesy of a handoff of the video by the Air Video app to the Safari app on the iDevice ... but only if the iDevice has been authorized to play your DRM-protected videos.
Air Video playback on an iPod or iPhone looks like this:
The Air Video app is fed by the Air Video Server running on a Mac or PC. On my Mac, upon being launched for the first time it installed itself as a Login Item that starts up each time my computer is booted, and then put its mini-icon in my menu bar:
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| Air Video Server's mini-icon is at left. |
Air Video Server Preferences
When Air Video Server is running in the background on my Mac, as it normally does, an item in its mini-icon's drop-down menu lets me view and modify Air Video Server's Preferences:
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| Air Video Server's "Shared Folders" Preferences Tab |
Air Video Server's "Shared Folders" preferences tab allows you to tell the server which of your Mac's folders (and all nested subfolders thereof) contain videos you want to stream to the Air Video app on your iDevice.
Remote Access
If you want Air Video to work when you are not at home and using your own WiFi network, you have to set up Air Video Server's "Remote" Preferences:
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| Air Video Server's "Remote" Preferences Tab |
This is where things can get tricky! A full rundown on how to do it can be read here.
Crucial to remote connection is This Server PIN. Mine (see above graphic) is 8** *** **5. (I am showing it here with asterisks replacing seven of the actual numbers so that online malefactors won't "steal" my video streams.) 8** *** **5 appeared as if by magic when I checked Enable Access from Internet.
Once I have my PIN, I simply can ...
... in the Air Video App on the iPhone. (I cribbed that image from the page I gave the link to earlier; it uses a different PIN than my own 8** *** **5.)
My WiFi router features NAT-PMP (which stands for "Network Address Translation - Port Mapping Protocol") support — but not UPnP (which stands for "Universal Plug and Play") support. Whatever those terms mean to true geeks, my home router's NAT-PMP support means to me that Air Video Server is telling my router the following: whenever the Air Video app on my iPhone asks for access to my PIN, send the request on to be honored by the Air Video Server, running on my Mac, itself. If I didn't check Automatically Map Port and get a PIN, that wouldn't happen.
If I had a router that lacks NAT-PMP or UPnP support, I'd have to do manual "port forwarding" to get Air Video to stream videos to my iPhone when I'm away from home. So it pays to have a router with NAT-PMP or UPnP support.
By means of the PIN, Air Video's away-from-home remote access works when you are at a WiFi hotspot. If WiFi is unavailable and your iDevice can get on the 3G cellphone network, remote access still works!
Full disclosure: though Air Video remote access works from almost wherever you are, if the network connection you are using is too slow, it may not work smoothly and reliably. Playback may start and stop and start and stop and start and stop ... . Remember, you've been warned!
7 comments:
Thanks for a great article.
I am interested in your comments about playing drm video files in safari. I am experiencing exactly what you described, which is all fine until I want to watch use AirPlay to watch the drm safari video on my ATV3. When I try this, I get the message "your apple tv is not authorized to play this content".
If you could shed any light on this problem it would be much appreciated as I have a lot of drm content that I would like to be able to access on my apple tv without using home sharing and without saving them directly onto my iPad.
Many thanks.
Anonymous said:
Thanks for a great article.
I am interested in your comments about playing drm video files in safari. I am experiencing exactly what you described, which is all fine until I want to watch use AirPlay to watch the drm safari video on my ATV3. When I try this, I get the message "your apple tv is not authorized to play this content".
If you could shed any light on this problem it would be much appreciated as I have a lot of drm content that I would like to be able to access on my apple tv without using home sharing and without saving them directly onto my iPad.
Many thanks.
Anonymous,
I'm glad you liked the article. I, like you, can't get DRM video content to stream from my iTunes Library to my Gen-2 Apple TV via my iPad using Air Video, Safari, and AirPlay. Nor does Apple's own Videos app on the iPad do the AirPlay trick.
The problem seems to be that Apple has set things up to defeat this, perhaps out of an abundance of caution that AirPlay might be used to get around copyright restrictions in other situations, though obviously not this quite legitimate one.
I tried using the iPad's ability to do AirPlay Mirroring to get what you're after to work, but it too gives me "Your Apple TV is not authorized to play this content."
But I can use Home Sharing to watch the DRM-protected videos directly on the Apple TV. I'm not exactly sure why you don't want to do the same thing? If you want to clarify that, maybe I can help more.
Eric
Thanks Eric.
I can use one sharing but would prefer to use a single method for watching videos as it is easier for my wife and daughter to use. At the moment I can use air video to play all video files except drm (how ironic).
Not the end of the world but it would be ice if apple allowed me to stream contenti bought from them from my pc to my iPad to my apple tv!
Anonymous said...
Thanks Eric.
I can use one sharing but would prefer to use a single method for watching videos as it is easier for my wife and daughter to use. At the moment I can use air video to play all video files except drm (how ironic).
Not the end of the world but it would be ice if apple allowed me to stream contenti bought from them from my pc to my iPad to my apple tv!
Yes, it's something Apple ought to get right, but doesn't. I think the relevant query is why we can't stream DRM movies from the Videos app to Apple TV via AirPlay. If all devices involved are using the same Apple ID and the same local network, it ought to work. And if that worked, then using iPad Safari as a proxy for Air Video ought to work, too.
Anyway, I was wondering if you could import all your non-DRM videos into iTunes. Then you could watch both the DRM videos and the non-DRM ones via your Apple TV, without getting the iPad involved.
Unfortunately all of my non DRM content is in AVI format, so I would have to convert it all to an apple format before I could put it in itunes. 1Tb of videos is a lot of converting!!!
Shannon said...
Unfortunately all of my non DRM content is in AVI format, so I would have to convert it all to an apple format before I could put it in itunes. 1Tb of videos is a lot of converting!!!
Yes, Shannon, that much converting is pretty much out of the question.
At the moment I'm too busy — I just bought a new iMac running OS X "Lion," and I find that it's time-consuming to transfer data to it from Quicken on my old "Snow Leopard," as "Lion" no longer runs the Quicken version I was using — but later on I'd like to look further into whether the problem you cited is in accordance with Apple's intentions, or is a bug.
If it's not intended to be that way, it may simply be a side-effect (thus a bug) related to some aspect of DRM protection that Apple imposes in order to keep the movie studios and TV producers happy.
Still, you would think that any DRM-protected video that plays in the usual way on an Apple TV under "My Movies" would also play when sent to the Apple TV via AirPlay from an iPad ... as long as the standard requirements concerning same Apple ID, same local network, etc. are met.
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