Sharing old home videos with family on Apple TV

[MacAddict22]

Hey Crew,

I can't seem to find an answer to my question. Excuse me if I missed during my searches.

I've been slated to convert all of my families VHS tapes and find a simple way to share them with members of the family scattered all over the US. The converting part I have down, that's easy. However, I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to share them. Everyone has Apple TVs and my idea was to share them in a photostream. Playing with iMovie 11 gives you the iMovie Theater. Cool stuff, but I don't think that will allow my family to view them on their Apple TVs.

Does anyone have suggestions on an extremely simple way for my family to view all the recently converted old home videos? Do they all have to log into my iCloud account on their Appple TVs? This will cause problems when they want to make purchases. I thought I could share an iMovie Theater like I share a photstream. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

 

[viorelgn]

Apple's Family Sharing system works by having the organizer and their credit card control purchasing of content on the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore for up to five other people. As long as all users are making purchases with the same credit card, all content purchased separately on different devices can be freely shared with one another. This includes legacy content tied to a separate Apple ID that may have been purchased with a different credit card. After setting up the payment method and adding authorized users, past purchases from other Apple IDs under the Family Sharing umbrella may not appear immediately. In our tests, we had to download content --?a free app did the trick -- in order to view others' purchases in Apple's three online storefronts. Application developers do need to enable Family Sharing for their content to be available on separate devices.

 

[priitv8]

iMovie theatre is a good way to share but unfortunately it has 15 minute size limit on clips.
IMHO your best bet is youtube. Create your own closed audience channel. Every aTV owner can log into YT and view your channel.

 

[MacAddict22]

Yeah, that does seem like the easiest. Explaining to the old folk that our videos aren't viewable to the world on YT will be the hard part...

The 15 min limit isn't an issue as of now. Is there a way to share videos that is more streamlined through the apple ecosystem? What if I created a photo stream, will videos from a photo stream play on an appletv?



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Apple's Family Sharing system works by having the organizer and their credit card control purchasing of content on the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore for up to five other people. As long as all users are making purchases with the same credit card, all content purchased separately on different devices can be freely shared with one another. This includes legacy content tied to a separate Apple ID that may have been purchased with a different credit card. After setting up the payment method and adding authorized users, past purchases from other Apple IDs under the Family Sharing umbrella may not appear immediately. In our tests, we had to download content --?a free app did the trick -- in order to view others' purchases in Apple's three online storefronts. Application developers do need to enable Family Sharing for their content to be available on separate devices.

I wasn't talking about Apple Family Share, I have that set up now with my fiancé. I'm talking about sharing videos I created in iMovie with my family members in New York, Connecticut, etc. Similar to a photo stream of my professional photographs I've shared.

A simple solution so the aging relatives don't have to call me everything they want to watch me use the "potty" for the first time from our home videos.

 

[dvdlovr24]

Air Video HD is a great streaming app that I use to share all of our home videos to family members. It supports AirPlay so while there's not s built in app, you can still watch it on there.

 

[erinsarah]

How about Flickr?

I actually just did this very thing today. I've started converting some old camcorder videos to digital, in an effort to get them converted before the day comes when I no longer have a computer with a FireWire port.

I used QuickTime Player to record the movie clips and saved them to my hard drive, then uploaded the files to my Flickr account. If you don't have an account, you should know they offer a full terabyte for free. when uploading, you can mark the videos as unavailable in search results and visible only to family members (which means you need to go through the steps to mark certain "friends" as family members, something I haven't done yet.

Then, your family can use the AppleTV's Flickr app to browse to your account, open the appropriate album, and boom, done.

 

[priitv8]

I used QuickTime Player to record the movie clips and saved them to my hard drive, then uploaded the files to my Flickr account.

Do you have a paid Flickr account? I tried Flickr (I use free account) as well, but my clip was automatically cut at 3:00 mark (NB! Minutes, not hours ). So in my experience Flickr has even more severe file size limits on movies than iCloud.

 

[MacAddict22]

I actually just did this very thing today. I've started converting some old camcorder videos to digital, in an effort to get them converted before the day comes when I no longer have a computer with a FireWire port.

I used QuickTime Player to record the movie clips and saved them to my hard drive, then uploaded the files to my Flickr account. If you don't have an account, you should know they offer a full terabyte for free. when uploading, you can mark the videos as unavailable in search results and visible only to family members (which means you need to go through the steps to mark certain "friends" as family members, something I haven't done yet.

Then, your family can use the AppleTV's Flickr app to browse to your account, open the appropriate album, and boom, done.

I spoke with someone at the Apple Store and they suggested Flickr as well.

I rendered a 15 minute video clip from iMovie and tried loading it into my newly created Flickr account. Seems they have a 1Gb limit on file sizes. That obviously restricts video length and quality.

Air Video HD. I think I looked into that once. I'll have to check it out. Does Air Video keep the files on the device or in the cloud? Photostream eats up iPhone storage when I share RAW files with people.

 

[erinsarah]

Do you have a paid Flickr account? I tried Flickr (I use free account) as well, but my clip was automatically cut at 3:00 mark (NB! Minutes, not hours ). So in my experience Flickr has even more severe file size limits on movies than iCloud.

I will have to check that out. Before the big redo of Flickr (back during Flickr's heyday) I had a paid account, but not anymore. And I just checked and every video I've built so far is well under a gig in size. So, I'm no subject matter expert when it comes to that. However this weekend I plan to work on some more videos, so I will see if I can hit that limit and report back.

 

[MacAddict22]

So, I have played with Air Video HD and I'm pretty wowed by it. I was able to download and set up a server on my Mac within minutes. I have tested it on my finances phone (on wifi and off wifi) and it loads videos very quickly. I also played with AirPlay through my office Apple TV and it works flawlessly.

I've prompted the family to download the $2.99 app and test it out. They are of course having some minner issues rolling this out, due to their age... I'll have them up and running this evening.

I'm sold on this product after playing with imovie theater, Flickr, and YouTube options. I do wish they had a Mac client I can deploy to family members so they can watch videos remotely on their Airs. Does anyone know if you can AirPlay from your iPhone to your MacBook Air without wifi?