So a few days ago I was browsing through the App Store on my iPhone looking for something I’ve been trying to find for a while: a decent application to allow me to stream video that already exists within my home network. I happened upon a superb app, one which any self-respecting iPhone owner & media geek should certainly go check out – after reading this brief overview, of course! It’s name is Air Video, and I’ll tell you all about it just past the ‘Read More’ link. Come join me, won’t you?

So this really is something which had been bugging me for a while. With the purported 120,000+ apps on Apple’s store, how could it be so difficult for me to find a decent video streaming app without having to go through the tedious process of ‘jailbreaking‘ my iPhone (call me old fashioned but I’d much rather stick with the original software, thanks!)? Anyhow, diatribe aside, I found this superb app – Air Video – which really does the trick. This nifty bit of software, coupled with the little ‘server side’ bit of software you have to install on whatever PC (or Mac) you want to stream from, will allow you to play most any video format on your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or iPad for that matter). The main problem for me in finding a decent video streaming app was that my entire library is saved in the .avi extension, and Apple being Apple, they only natively allow support for their own formats (.m4v, .mp4, .mov etc.). So not only did I need a good streaming app, it needed to be able to convert my videos on the fly – that is to say, as I was watching them. Very cool capability. Air Video allows you to do just that – you can ‘live convert’ almost any video format into an iPhone-compatible one as you watch, and it doesn’t need to save the converted file afterwards or anything, so you needn’t worry about that precious disk space!

As I mentioned, you do (of course) have to install a proprietary bit of software on whichever PC(s) or Mac(s) you’d like to stream content from. Incidentally, if you do end up getting this app, make sure you upgrade the computer’s software version every time you upgrade the app – or you might lose compatibility! The computer software is actually pretty cool (yes I’m nerdy, what else is new?) – it’s pretty lightweight but has some nifty features like being able to manually add/manage folders from wherever you’d like to the pool you’d like to stream from, ability to choose custom ports to stream through, even the ability to choose which font is displayed should you choose to view subtitled videos, and the ability to set up a password should you want to stream over the internet (we definitely recommend setting a strong password if you choose to use that option!) but more on that in a minute.

The iPhone software is pretty nice, too – just what you’d expect really! A pretty minimal interface, with the ability to easily browse through your folder hierarchy and change standard settings etc, but the iPhone app actually also allows you to choose things like bitrate and resolution of live conversion, and allows you to add videos to a queue to be converted and kept for later, should you want to do that. You of course have the option of having the computer-software on as many machines as you’d like, and it’s intuitively easy to switch between machines – just navigate up in the folder hierarchy until you see their names, then just select a different one.Alternatively, you can just tap the ‘Servers’ button in the lower left of the screen and it’ll bring you back any time. They’ve kindly included that little 30 second rewind button in the video player, too – so should someone rudely interrupt your video viewing time, you can just give that a tap and it’ll rewind you back 30 seconds. One particularly elegant feature (and by elegant, I mean I’m just impressed at how handy this comes in) is that the app also remembers your last position when watching any video, so if I was to stop watching a video at say, 12mins 31 secs in, and go watch a new one, it’d remember that and ask me next time I select that video if I’d like to resume the video from the last position, 12:31, or start from the beginning. Cool.

Now to the very cool stuff. This is all of course available from the comfort of your home, over your network – but it’s also available over a 3G connection (or even a decent EDGE connection, if you’re OK letting it buffer for a minute). I’ll just let that sink in for a minute. Your entire video collection is now potentially available – anywhere. No more having to constantly sync your device to get the latest episodes of American Dad, taking up all of your storage space! All you need to know is your IP address, and to make sure your router supports uPnP (which most do). I could go into more detail, but I feel it’s a bit redundant. If you have any questions/ problems with internet setup of this app, check out the developers website here. In case you were wondering, it also supports HD videos – it of course downsizes them automatically to the iPhone’s native resolution, but should you wish to (and again, don’t mind waiting for the buffering process) you can change that resolution to better suit your device’s needs, perhaps to suit your upcoming iPad purchase? Hmm?

There is one small caveat to all of this madness. Well, two really. 1.) The app costs £1.79 (or $2.99 for you crazy kids across the pond) – a pretty nominal fee for the feature set if you ask me! If you don’t want to commit to that massive investment (arf arf) then you can always check out the free version of the app – it has the full feature set of the paid app but will only show you videos/ video folders in random groups of 3-5. If you’re really tight you could always just rearrange your video library into folder groups of three! 2.) The process of live video conversion is fairly processor heavy, so if you’re going to be streaming video outwith said Apple – approved formats, do make sure that nobody is using the host computer at the time – it will probably slow down their experience somewhat!

So there you have it, folks. A very cool bit of kit. The full version is available on the app store here, and the free version here. You will of course need to visit the developer’s website for the relevant computer software, too – which can be found here. Do you have any tips or tricks to share? Any exciting experiences with this app or one like it? Share with us in the comments below, and thanks for reading!