You can snap photos of your iPhone, edit them on your iPad, and view them on your giant-screen iMac, with everything almost instantaneously in sync. But what if you have a video clip that you want to watch on your Apple TV? Oh man, maybe it’s best not to even ask. Now, though, there’s an app that lets you do just that: DropStream.
DropStream’s function is right there in its name. You drop a movie onto its Mac window, and the movie starts playing on your Apple TV (or Chromecast). You don’t have to convert it to the right format, or add it to iTunes, or anything like that. It just, as they say, works.
DropStream Video
Photo: AirSquirrels
DropStream comes from AirSquirrels, the developer behind Reflector, which turns your Mac into an AppleTV. I use Reflector 2 and find it excellent and reliable, so I expect DropStream to be just as good. DropStream works with video and audio. When you drop a file (or a playlist) onto the App, it takes care of converting the file to make it Airplay-compatible, and stream it across.
The video stream can be sent to an Apple TV, a Chromecast, to AirPlay-enabled speakers, or to a Mac running Reflector. You can easily pick from a list of available receivers, or search the entire network to find one. You can also switch audio tracks for movies which have more than one, and you can add subtitles.
Audio
DropStream’s audio support is much the same, only it converts all kinds of audio formats in the fly instead of video. You can also stream your Mac’s system audio for a quick-and-dirty shortcut to get, say, a stream playing in Safari onto an AirPlay speaker. If you drop a folder, or multiple files, into DropStream, then you can arrange those files into a playlist.
DropStream is a neat tool which does one thing, and does it with a clear interface. It’s also cheap, at $10, making it an easy purchase for anyone who has ever had the need to play something somewhere else.
Price: $9.99
Download: DropStream from the AirSquirrels (Mac)
