While newer iOS devices come in sizes up to 64 Gb, it takes up a lot of space to store a ton of videos there. Likewise, synchronizing the videos you think you might want to watch later can be an exercise in futility, trying to second-guess yourself and your future video-watching tastes. And let’s not forget the time consuming task of converting videos from a non-Mac or iTunes friendly format to ones that work a little better with our chosen OS platform. Today, however, we have an app that will help with these problems.
Air Video, by InMethod s.r.o., is a $3 app that allows you to stream your videos from your Mac to your iPad (or iPhone, or iPod touch) without any need for conversion. Air Video will convert even non-iTunes friendly files like AVI and DIVX video files via a server app that runs on your Mac. If the video file is too big or your WiFi is too slow to manage this, the Air Video server can also process the files ahead of time for use on your iOS device.
First up, head over to the Air Video website to download a small app to run on your Mac or Windows machine. Download the server and, on the Mac at least, open the disk image file (DMG) and drag the Air Video Server app inside of it to your Applications folder. Double click on that to start the server, and add a folder or iTunes playlist of non protected videos to the server.
Then hop onto your iPhone (or iPad) and download the Air Video iOS app from the App Store. This will download it to your device. Launch the app with a tap on the app icon, and you’ll see the Servers page. Tap the plus symbol in the upper left corner, and then tap on the name of the computer you just started the server on.
Once connected, tap on the name of the server computer again, and you’ll see the folders and playlists you’ve added to the server. Tap on a folder or playlist and you’ll see a list of the movies within. Tap on the name of a movie and you’ll see the play and conversion options. You can choose to Play, Play with Live Conversion, or Convert the movie at this point. There’s also a spot to change the conversion settings. Tap the play option of your choice, and you’re streaming video to your iPad (or iPhone)!
This solution should let you keep those big video files off of your smaller capacity iOS device, while still allowing you to watch them there.
Source: PC World
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