Air Video

No problems even with huge files here.

What machine are you running the AirVideo server on?

Where are you watching the content? Over 3G?

I thought it was too laggy and gave up on it

I am using AirVideo a lot now in our vacation cottage. I run it on an old iPhone with a video cable to a TV and stream movies from my laptop to the TV. Of course, its also works great on the iPad. The live conversion works OK, but the app will drop the quality level down if the server or the network can't keep up.

I usually just use this same great app to que up offline conversions overnight. Once the movie is in the m4v format, it plays very smoothly.

Not to sure if you guys have tried cinexplayer, all you do is sync your iPad then go to filesharing and hit add add your .avi file then it will take one min or so boot up your app and your movie will play worked for me with cop out

miamijim said:

I was watching video over my home network over wifi from my iMac HD.

Never had issues with it before but the file I was watching was 720p.HDTV.X264 mkv file I am thinking that Air Video could be having trouble with this quality of a file.

Click to expand...

AirVideo has some settings on the server/application on your source computer to downsample to a lower quality if the processor/network can't keep up. This might be what is happening in your instance.Look at the specs of your machine and the settings on the server app to see what you'll be capable doing.

In general use, I have been extremely happy using it with my video library. If they included other media serving like music and photos it would be ideal (serving iPhoto libraries and iTunes libraries or browsing directories as they currently do for video).

Real time re-encoding is very processor intensive. It might be that your computer isn't fast enough to re-encode that file on the fly, so it downsamples it to crappy quality in order to make it not stutter. If you want to view files in good quality, the best thing is just to queue up a bunch of files for re-encoding and then watch them after they're re-encoded (you can watch one re-encoded file while re-encoding another one without affecting performance).

miamijim said:

I am having trouble watching some files through this app.

I have noticed the larger files which contain content in HD have a difficult time with direct conversion, they tend to pixalate.

I know that I can not expect to actually watch HD on this, but has anyone else had conversion issues from files from HD sources.

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You can't even watch HD on the iPad anyway... 720P, which is the lowest HD doesn't exist on the iPad. 1280x720 > 1024x768

miamijim, when did you buy your iMac? Do you know what processor is in it?

miamijim said:

I am having trouble watching some files through this app.

I have noticed the larger files which contain content in HD have a difficult time with direct conversion, they tend to pixalate.

I know that I can not expect to actually watch HD on this, but has anyone else had conversion issues from files from HD sources.

Click to expand...

EthanNixon said:

You can't even watch HD on the iPad anyway... 720P, which is the lowest HD doesn't exist on the iPad. 1280x720 > 1024x768

Click to expand...

Thanks sherlock.

Also consider your router. A lot of time people are trying to do things with a lower grade router that might not be able to handle the requests.

miamijim said:

I am having trouble watching some files through this app.

I have noticed the larger files which contain content in HD have a difficult time with direct conversion, they tend to pixalate.

I know that I can not expect to actually watch HD on this, but has anyone else had conversion issues from files from HD sources.

Click to expand...

I get the same issue with MKV files which are HD quality, when I play them over Air Video the quality isn't good. Normal XVID or DIVX files are fine.

Like others here have said, instead I queue the MKV files to be converted first, they then playback fine. So I'm guessing it's my Mac Mini which is 4 years or so old so probably can't convert MKV files fast enough for streaming.

I've got a pretty powerful PC with terabytes of DVDs I've ripped, and I have to say air video might be one of my most used apps. It's simply great. But your machine does need some moxy to handle it.

Looking forward to similar support or a similar app for photos.

I find Streamtome much better than Air Video.