I think I may have mentioned in a previous Kibbles & Bytes article about how when I got my iPad Air I opted for cellular data over extra onboard storage. I put a good amount of thought into that decision, and it’s not one I’d recommend for everyone. One of my favorite things to do with my iPad is watch movies on it, and they look really great on that Retina display. The smaller amount of storage does mean that I can’t load it up with a bunch of HD movies though. However, with the cellular data and a bit of nerdy know-how, I’m able to watch much more than what’s on Netflix.
To accomplish this, I needed to solve two problems. First, how am I going to serve up these movie files that currently live on my desktop at home? Second, how am I going to play those files on my iPad? As far as serving up media content (videos, audio and photos), there are a number of options out there. Some are free, some are not, but they all work pretty well. One of the most popular and full-featured server solutions is Plex. Plex is very easy to use, and it runs on a wide variety of platforms including OS X, Linux, Windows and even a variety of NAS hardware like Drobo and Synology.
Unfortunately, in my case, my server hardware is a 2007 Mac mini that refuses to let me install anything later than 10.5.8 onto it. This means I can’t run Plex, which requires 10.6 Snow Leopard or later. After I wiped the tears of defeat from my face, I came across another media server solution called Serviio. It’s definitely a bit rougher on the edges than Plex, but it does run on 10.5 (and Windows, and Linux, and Synology NAS)!
I won’t go into how to set up one of these servers, but user-friendly systems like Plex and Serviio are pretty simple. You install them and point them to your media library directory and they take care of finding files, looking up metadata, and organizing things. Both Plex and Serviio have active communities and support that should make getting up and running easy for almost anyone.
So I had my server, but how was I going to watch all these great movies (like Hackers)? Allow me to introduce you to the VLC Media Player app. Many people are probably familiar with the desktop version of the VLC player that has been available on a wide array of operating systems for years. It’s now available on iOS. As a media player, it’s able to play media files located in it’s sandboxed folder within the app, but the more powerful feature is its ability to find and attach to DLNA media servers like Plex and Serviio. With the server running on your local network, you can simply open the VLC app and select “Local Network.” It’ll find the server as a UPNP (Universal Plug-n-Play) source. You can then access it and browse by media type, folder, name and more, all of which is handled by the server software.
As for performance, I’ve seen very few problems. Serviio is able to handle a wide variety of file formats and bit-rates and can serve them up in real time to your devices. I’ve had some problems with .AVI files not buffering correctly, but overall, it works very well. Now I can watch any of my movies in HD on the nice Retina display without wasting valuable storage space!
Bonus points: I mentioned that I have cellular data on my iPad. Can this be used in the same way to stream content? Yes and no. These media servers are designed to stream over local networks, not out to the public internet which is what I’d need them to do if I wanted to watch movies anywhere over cellular. That said, with a bit of nerdy witchcraft I can “stream” video from my web server using its public IP address and any number of free HTML5 video players. This is a considerably more difficult and manual process, but hey, video anywhere!
Postscript: After writing this, I tried to find a link for the VLC app. Sadly, it appears that it’s been dropped from the App Store while they figure out some issues related to iOS 8. Hopefully they’ll return it soon. In the meantime, people are recommending the Infuse 3 app.