How can I stream movies from my home PC to my MBA while on the road via WiFi?

Matth3w said:

Is this possible? Like to set up a server on my PC and then stream to my MBA? I have 4TB worth of videos so it's not worth it to drag them around. And my wife and I both have MBA (hers is the newest mine is the very latest before). We both have Parallels and Windows installed as well.

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Sounds like a cloud-based service would be best for you, like iCloud or Amazon's equivalent. You can upload movies to the cloud (not 4TBs of them, but still a decent amount) and then access them anywhere via WiFi.

Most likely it would be best to run a server (like mamp) on your computer.
Then access the server on the macbook air and stream videos.
Not really sure if it's a feasible task though, i've never tried streaming over the net on my own server.

Matth3w said:

I'd much rather not, that's a pain in the butt. You can stream movies from your computer to your iPhone/iPad/iPod, why not from computer to computer?

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I did this. I had to set up a linux box to pull it off thought. Are you comfortable with command line linux?

Matth3w said:

Not really. I guess I figured since they had so many apps to stream from computer to iDevice, why not computer to MBA? But I guess that makes too much sense.

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I agree. I bet it's just because of copyright law and file sharing issues.

If you change your mind, google "stream itunes library" and you'll find a couple guides. I haven't set one of these up in about a year (looong time in tech world) so you might stumble across an easier solution.

Have you considered AirVideo? AirVideo is normally an app for iOS. It has a "server" component that runs on your media computer to serve the files. Then it has iOS apps for iPad and iPhone to stream. It's nice because it also has the ability to convert on the fly, if the video file is not an Apple supported format.

But, there's a home-brewed Mac client (a Windows one too). You can download the Mac client here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6713110/MacAirVideoClient/Site/Home.html

You can read more info about it here: http://www.inmethod.com/forum/posts/list/120/514.page

It seems to work for me. Now, normally, its for LAN-based use, but if you open up ports on your router, and use a Dynamic DNS service, you can use it via WAN also. Instructions for doing this are provided by the AirVideo developers.

I use StreamToMe (Free program through App Store) and it works great! I use AirVideo for my wife to view on her iPad so finding a Mac solution was great. This works almost exactly like AirVideo and given the fact that its free, its hard to beat!

saketbash said:

I use StreamToMe (Free program through App Store) and it works great! I use AirVideo for my wife to view on her iPad so finding a Mac solution was great. This works almost exactly like AirVideo and given the fact that its free, its hard to beat!

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Yeah, I use this too, it is also really quick and good quality on it.

+1 for StreamToMe/ServeToMe.

Both Airvideo and StreamToMe work great, but i also recommend Zumocast. It can be accessed from anywhere without any sort of network configuration needed, just log into the web interface using your browser

Paulywauly said:

Both Airvideo and StreamToMe work great, but i also recommend Zumocast. It can be accessed from anywhere without any sort of network configuration needed, just log into the web interface using your browser

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You don't need to configure your network with StreamToMe either, except for on your home computer, which is needed for anything that will be streamed from your home.