Air Video Server

I'm a big iPhone fan, I've had one since the day they came out in the UK. Well, not exactly true, I don't have one right now after losing it on a beery stag weekend in Malaga... but that's beside the point :) They are an amazing design with a beautiful screen, so any self-respecting HTPC needs to be able to serve up content to it right?

Enter Air Video by InMethod. It's a beautifully simple piece of software, but they've done a really good job with it.

The first thing you'll want to do is go install the server software on your HTPC. It's a very lightweight program that lives in the menu bar and generally stays out the way. You'll need to tell it what directories to share which is a simple, painless process carried out in the Preferences panel of the app.

Notice I'm sharing my EyeTV archive? I mentioned this in an earlier post on EyeTV; while EyeTV itself will automatically convert recordings to iPhone format and stream them to an iPhone app, it can't come close to the performance and ease-of-use of the Air Video solution. While the EyeTV conversion process is a slow, CPU-intensive affair, InMethod somehow manage to convert pretty much any video format to iPhone format on-the-fly and stream it straight to the iPhone app, no waiting, no messing. It'll even stream over 3G. Of course, it will also let you schedule videos for conversion in advance, either from the server or from the iPhone client itself.

Speaking of the Air Video iPhone client, there's a bit of bad news. It's not free. It'll set you back a whopping £1.79. Trust me, it's easily worth 50 times that so stump up the cash :)