AirFlick Offers Video Streaming from Mac to Apple TV over AirPlay

[twoodcc]

now this sounds great to me! i will see if i can get it to work

 

[pruppert]

Sorry bro, I wasn't very specific. You type in ps ax | grep ffmpeg into terminal, running on the Mac that is serving up the stream. The pain with that method is that you have to initiate streaming on the iPhone app.

That unofficial client I linked to is nice because it can initiate the streaming without ever having to open (or even install) the iPhone app. Just click the button that says "servers", and add your server (if you generated a Server PIN from within the AirVideo Server's preferences, it'll make it easier to retrieve your server's credentials--just type the PIN into the box asking for the PIN and click "Retrieve"). After adding your server, click "Connect" in the main window, and select a video. In the application slide-out drawer, click "Play with Live Conversion"...this will open the video in QuickTime X. Then get the url of that stream by clicking Window-->Show Movie Properties. Type that url into Erica Sadun's app and you're good to go.

Alright. That helped. Thanks for the further instructions.

I was also running into a problem with my AT&T 2wire router that doesn't support UPnP or NAT-PMP which was making it impossible to get the AirVideo server to actually serve the video. Some manual port forwarding on the router with the help of these two links (more the latter) got things going.

http://inmethod.com/forum/posts/list/949.page;jsessionid=760E56A36F0AE880B3B3C667347D2FBB

http://portforward.com/english/applications/port_forwarding/Air_Video/Air_Videoindex.htm

Finally, it seems that the AirVideo client app couldn't connect to the AirVideo server app as long as a password was set in the sever preferences, even if I entered the password into the client apps preferences. So I just turned the password requirement off in the AirVideo server prefs and then everything just worked.

Thanks again for your idea and further help.

 

[irun5k]

I think this streaming from anywhere to everywhere is going to get confusing for many users. One tiny example, the Apple Remote app for iOS allows you to browse for media to play using a rich UI- cover art and what not. It looks very similar to how it looks if you're browsing media local to the iPad using iTunes, except that you're not. In fact, if you've got a new Apple TV, you're not even browsing content on your Apple TV- this is stuff on the host Mac. OTOH you can stream local content on the iPad to the Apple TV via Airplay. Now consider that many people might have multiple copies of the same movie in various places- the movie you have on your Mac might also exist on your iPad, although potentially at a different quality level depending on how you got the movie.

 

[blybug]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

Yes, using the Remote app on an iDevice can be confusing. The top level menu displays all shared iTunes/computers and AppleTVs. Selecting a computer puts you in control of that computer's iTunes. Selecting AppleTV shows the same list of computers to choose which iTunes you're going to stream to the AppleTV. Hierarchically it does make sense, but once you've drilled a few menus deep it's easy to forget where you're digging and what you're controlling. Not to mention that the interface looks essentially identical to the iPod. Toss in direct Airplay streaming of local content and your head can spin.

Perhaps the Remote app ought to have a two graphical "frames" drawn around the menus and the content representing where the content is coming from and where it's being streamed to. As it is, the screen shows the cover art and isn't doing anything useful anyhow, why not a pic of my MacBook with the cover art and an arrow pointing to a pic of an AppleTV?

I get that the idea is eventually it won't matter, and even the cloud is in the mix. Who cares where the media is stored, access it from wherever and watch it. Still would be nice to have a one glance representation on the iPad/iPhone screen of what is happening. I'm getting a little lost sometimes...now I'm picturing my mom delving into this and not quite getting why her movie quits playing on the TV when she sleeps her computer and/or turns off her phone.

 

[Metsfan7450]

I've never once had a need to stream from my Mac to the TV. If it's on my Mac it's probably already on my TV.

What I really want is to stream movies FROM my TV or Mac TO my iPhone. It'd be great to save spacing on my iOS device and just stream the content when I need it.

Sounds like you need Slingbox.

 

[Metsfan7450]

I don't have Apple TV yet, so I can't try this new feature. Can anyone confirm whether or not you can stream espn3 to from your mac to your tv? I'll purchase one tonight if that's the case

 

[crh3ff]

You can go to a website that has IOS compatible video and stream it to a APPLE TV 2. This was never possible on the old AppleTV.

its using Airplay\AirVideo

What if it's not an iOS compatible site? Has anyone tested to see if this will work with Hulu?

 

[Bregalad]

Surely you jest, as it would be a little difficult to stream fully uncompressed video over a standard WiFi connection. However, wireless HDMI is being developed and currently marketed ( http://www.amazon.com/Gefen-EXT-WHD...BPPM/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1292891494&sr=8-6 ), but YMMV as to its cost and usability. There is also Intel's WiDi but the adapter box for WiDi (that thing you connect to the TV) is just about as expensive as the new Apple TV (and I'm pretty certain that WiDi makes heavy use of compression, so it doesn't fit your decoding model). There are also devices that will re-transmit analog video wirelessly to a receiver box on your TV, Radio Shack use to sell one for not very much money and the quality was okay (for analog SD content).

I posted that without really thinking about the lousy frame rate one gets while screen sharing. Point conceded.

 

[jettredmont]

I've never once had a need to stream from my Mac to the TV. If it's on my Mac it's probably already on my TV.

What I really want is to stream movies FROM my TV or Mac TO my iPhone. It'd be great to save spacing on my iOS device and just stream the content when I need it.

I have about 2TB of movies on a Drobo attached to my Mac. I don't think they'll all fit in my 160GB ATV 1st-gen. They definitely won't fit in the 8GB of flash on a new ATV. So, yeah, streaming is the way to go.

The DLNA folks here seem to be missing the boat. AirPlay isn't about going to your ATV, connecting to a source, navigating around, and playing. It is about, you already have it on your laptop screen; make ATV play it in one click. I haven't ever heard of any DLNA device allowing for that, and that's the point.

On streaming to your iphone ... yeah, I agree that would be nice. Or streaming Mac to Mac, etc. Hopefully Apple's working on it.

 

[dbrockman]

no luck!

I have tried Hulu, NBC, and Youtube and could not get it to work. What might I be doing wrong?

 

[Gwgrayson]

Ok, by doing this hack, you can stream ANY video format sitting on your Mac to your AppleTV. I'm testing out an mkv file right now, and it works like a charm!

Download the unofficial Mac AirVideo client here:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6713110/MacAirVideoClient/Site/Download.html

Start playback of a video using live conversion from within this unofficial client, it should hand off the streaming video to Quicktime X.

Inspect the stream by viewing the Movie Inspector (check the "Window" menu for Quicktime). Write down that url.

Paste that url into Erica Sadun's Airflick app and boom now your AppleTV can basically play any video you throw at it! Looking forward to someone streamlining the process into a neat little app.

I'm considering reposting this in the TUAW comments in case anyone else finds it handy.

OPTIONAL
One extra little note: you don't have to necessarily download the unofficial Mac AirVideo client above. You can instead begin playback of a video from within the AirVideo iphone app, then go to the mac serving up the stream, and type "ps ax | grep ffmpeg", and grab the alphanumeric string following the --conversion-id flag.

Then paste into AirFlick the following:
http://[YOUR-SERVER'S-IP-ADDRESS]:45631/live-playback-2.4.0/index_[CONVERSION-ID].m3u8

So I've gotten all of this to work. The only problem is that when AirVideo begins live converting avi and mkv files it doesn't do it at the proper resolution. I've tried to change that under the conversion tab but that seems to only work for permanent conversions and not live ones. Is it possible to live convert at the native resolution?

 

[inspectomatt]

Anyone had trouble finding their Apple TV in airflick? Any suggestions?
I have airplay set up and have used it within itunes, but just can't get airflick to see the TV, I've tried from multiple computers now.

 

[tyeunk]

im getting an error from the ATV everytime after i add the file to airflick? any ideas?? i'm pretty sure i have everything set up correctly until the error i get.