Last night couldn’t fall asleep. So instead of going downstairs and cranking up the home theater system downstairs and risking waking up my wife, I looked into iphone apps that stream movie and tv shows (btw, my favorite keeping track of tv shows iphone app is TV Shows) so I could watch a flick in bed on my ipod touch. Best one I found was Air Video $3. I initially played with the demo as the only limitation it has is it displays three random movies in selected directory but you can hit refresh repeatedly to locate one your looking for. Air Video is awesome as it transcodes xvid video files on my NAS on the fly with my iMac dual core 2.66GHz as the transcoding server. No you can’t do .iso or video_ts but can do just about anything else xvid, divx, mkv, avi, etc. It takes 10 seconds for it to start playing while it prepares by transcoding and buffering.
I like to set Quality to about 75% which looks fantastic. You can lower that if your on a 3G connection instead of a wifi. Love to change the Target Resolution and adjust the zoom slider. Got to decide how much your willing to crop off (don’t do too much) and trying to get some nice fill screen by increasing the height of the video. Seek to any point in the video and it’ll start playing in 10 seconds. Does not stream itunes videos purchases as that is DRM protected.
Only a few months ago got an xbox 360 and was under the assumption you had to hack it to stream video like I do with my old xboxes with xbmc. Found out that’s not the case. Got my Readynas NV (NAS) to serve as the server by enabling UPnP in Discovery Services and in Streaming Services enabled ReadyDLNA. After a quick xbox live update to play xvid and divx files I could play them. Doesn’t do .iso or video_ts folders sigh. But big deal if it plays my standard def files which my original xboxes already do. I want to play 720p and 1080p files that’s the whole point. Most that I get are .mkv format and xbox 360 doesn’t play 5.1 audio unless it’s .wmv format.
So after reading through bunch of stuff and some solutions which were mostly for windows like mk2vob and gotsent. I honestly don’t miss being a moderator on doom9.org – those were the days. I installed on my iMac the ps3 media server (works for xbox 360 too) which transcodes on the fly like Air Video does for iphone streaming. However, it stuttered every now and then even though I’m on a 100% gigabit ethernet connection. Best I could do was pause the movie, couldn’t fast forward, skip forward and not even resume. Fail!
So best solution I came up with is mkvtools $5 for mac and it works awesome. Drag the mkv file and it’ll list the video and audio tracks. Check the ones you want. Choose MP4 conversion, device choose xbox 360, video choose Pass Thru (which means it’s not touching your video), audio choose aac which converts 5.1 AC3 audio into 2 channel audio which xbox 360 will play, press Convert. Wait a few of minutes (about 5 mins per 1GB) and voila it outputs somexbox360_720p.mp4 video which is playable on xbox 360 from my NAS. All it does is demuxes (extracts video and audio tracks from mk4 file) and converts AC3 audio file to 2 channel and remuxes (puts together into new mp4 file) the original video file and new audio file. mkvtools is totally functional just had 5 second nag screen on start and can’t batch queue up video files.
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