How To Stream Media to Your iPhone Using Air Video

Chances are, your iPhone is probably already filled with a considerable bevy of music, photos and video – but just how much of your video collection are you able to fit on the phone? This is a pretty legitimate question when you factor in the kind of space applications can take up, especially if you’ve been fairly liberal in downloading them.

Your Mac or PC could provide an answer to this by providing wireless and remote access to your media collection using InMethod’s Air Video, an app that can stream video in almost any format over 3G or Wi-Fi for free. Let’s take a look at how it works.

Setting Up

After you’ve downloaded and installed Air Video on your iPhone and Air Video Server, you can launch the app on your Mac or PC. A small icon shows up on the top menu bar of the Mac, while Windows users will see it in their status bars.

Usually, upon the first launch of the server, the Preferences window should open up automatically. If it doesn’t, click the icon and highlight Preferences to open it up. This window is where all the setup takes place, allowing you to customize certain elements the way you want.

Shared Folders

The most obvious is to click ‘Yes’ to get the server running. The Shared Folders tab allows you to choose any folder on your hard drive you want to stream from. Though the app is heavy on video, like its namesake, there is a separate button for adding specific playlists from your iTunes collection as well.

This is a cool way to listen to music that you might otherwise not want clogging up space on your iPhone or iPod touch. Naturally, you can add and remove folders and playlists at will anytime you launch the app. You can’t, however, manage the shared folders the same way from your iPhone or iPod touch.

Conversion can take care of any encoding issues that might restrict video playback, but you really don’t have to take that step here, since the Air Video iPhone app can do that on its own. I’ll get to that in a bit.

Settings gives you the option of starting up the server every time you boot up, setting a password, and adjusting the resolution for video conversion. The default resolution is fine, but it’s your call on whether you think you need the other options.

Subtitles is cool in that you can choose how soft subtitles are rendered in your videos, including preferences on languages.

Remote is the key to making the connection with your phone, and thankfully, it’s very easy to do. Once you click “Enable Access from Internet”, you should get a Server PIN that you will need to input in your phone later. You will also need to click the box underneath so that Air Video Server can automatically port map through your router. Please note that you will need a router that supports UPnP or NAT-PMP protocols in order to even get through and make all this work.

Remote Internet Access

There might be cases where the server indicates a warning about something it might not like. This could vary from just not being able to get the server connected to a case like mine, where it noted that I had two routers set up. In the end, I had no problems running everything despite the presence of an extra router.

Make the Connection

Launch the Air Video app on your phone or touch and you will immediately be taken to the Servers screen. Tap the + icon and the next screen offers two options to make a connection. First, is the Server PIN method, and second is the option to connect specifically using an IP address. Since the first option is the easiest, I’ll be focusing on that one.

Tap Server PIN and input the number that you were given under the Remote tab on the Air Video Server. Tap Save once you’re done. The app will then negotiate the connection and load your new server under the Server menu. Keep in mind that your computer will need to be turned on and stay connected to the Internet at all times in order for you to gain server access.

Connecting from Your iPhone

Streaming the Content

Now that the hard parts are done, you can focus on the fun of the app. Tap your computer on your Server screen, and a menu with your different folders should open up. Tap any one you want and browse through your library.

Browsing Media

With video, there will likely be many cases where the iPhone or iPod touch can’t recognize the file format. Air Video can transcode the video on the fly, which makes it easy for you to watch, but doesn’t allow you to skip forward until the whole file has been converted.

Conversion On-The-Fly

You can, however, opt to convert the video before you even get to watch it, just to enable a more interactive viewing experience. Conversion times do vary depending on the size of the file. Naturally, a 2GB MKV file will take considerably longer to process than a 350MB AVI one. Try it out and see for yourself.

Watching a Movie

Conclusion

The beauty of an app like Air Video is not just that it works smoothly over 3G and Wi-Fi, but also that you’re in ownership and control of the content you want to stream. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the app is free to download and use from start to finish. And with the developers consistently supporting its release with updates, there’s a lot of upside here.

It’s not entirely a cloud-based solution since you’re required to have your computer on and connected to simply have a server to tap into. But it does give you what you need, and takes care of the heavy lifting, in the process. Not much more you can ask for than that.