...because another iPad blog won't hurt anyone

on april 3rd 2010 a friend of mine travelled all the way to beautiful New York city to pick up a brand new iPad just for me ! I decided that i'd write down my thoughts and experiences and maybe some reviews of apps or accessories. I am also an amateur astronomer and am running an astronomy blog

Friday, April 23, 2010

Air Video

Air Video from Inmethod allows you to stream media content from your mac or windows PC to your iPad. It is supposed to be able to share content in your private wireless network as well as over the internet. It requires a server component that needs to be installed locally on your computer and it does not support (DRM) content that was purchased in the iTunes store.

Installation - I just downloaded the server component from their website and then ran the software. It creates a little icon on the upper right corner of your OSX menu bar. I did have to go back to their site in order to download the latest beta version - but more on that later.

Configuration - You can configure the server in the "preferences" pane. Here you can either add one or more physical drives that you can share or you can add iTunes playlists. It does not matter if it's a regular or smart playlist. 

When I used it for the first time I defined one of my media drives as the source which resulted in a very loooong liste of files on my iPad. I quickly decided that this was not very usable so i created a couple of smart playlists in iTunes, for example a playlist that would list all movies within the genre "science fiction" or a playlist that would list all files for season 7 of the TV Show "24". This gave me a much nicer structure and also made it much easier to scroll through and find specific content.

At first, the Air Video server did not find any iTunes playlists. I had to download the latest beta release which fixes this particular problem.

Internet Sharing -  When i tried to activate the internet sharing features, i got a "double NAT detected" error message. I am currently using only one router connected to my cable modem and theoretically this should work just fine. I did not want to fiddle with my router settings just to get this feature working, so i could not test this particular feature. There's a whole section about this problem in the air video forums - but I've not been able to read it yet.

Performance - I did have some issues with HD video content with a very high resolution (1080p), which resulted in stuttering playback on the iPad. This could be due to missing ressources on either my iMac or on the network. Content at 720p resoluion or lower did play back just fine on the iPad. Server load on my iMac was at 50%. You can either choose "direct playback" or "on the fly transcoding". I always chose "direct playback" which worked just fine. My wireless network runs on an Apple Airport Express base station in G/N compatibility mode.



All in all it's a great product for just 2.99 USD ! Now i can sit next to my wife on the couch and watch the latest episode of "V" while she's watching Heidi Klum and her beautiful models...

Pros:
  • You don't have to tediously sync content to your iPad anymore
  • Works over the internet (although not for me)
  • Even plays back content that does not come in the standard iTunes formats
  • The interface is simple and elegant
Cons:
  • Does not support content with DRM protection
  • Does not support direct iTunes library integration - you have to manually add playlists. It would be nice if it would just attach itself to your iTunes library - like the Apple TV does

2 comments:

  1. Hallo
    Kann man so auch .mkv Dateien auf dem iPad abspielen ?

    Greez

    ReplyDelete
  2. Klar - das funktioniert mit der eingebauten "play with trancoding" option perfekt.

    ReplyDelete