Transcoding media server streaming to the iPhone
- by pilif
I have a huge collection of videos in different formats, but with one thing in common: They are not playable on an iPhone (or iPod Touch). Instead of complaining about Apple's IMHO broken world view ("there are no video formats but quicktime and mp4"), I wonder if there's a solution out there that allows streaming these different videos to the iPhone.
This means that the source media needs to be transcoded on the fly.
I already tried a few solutions out there, but with varying success:
PS3 Media Server kind of worked, but only once and only for one single file.
TVersity is said to work, but it requires UAC to be disabled and I don't see any need for this.
The solution I'm looking for should run on Windows 2008 Server or Linux.
I just can't believe that there's nothing out there that would allow me to stream my huge video collection on my iPhone (we're talking Wifi here, not 3G).
After looking at the answers provided and after retrying TVersity without much success, I gave Orb another try and while the web interface failed to work for me, the iPhone Application (I tried the free one at first) actually worked flawlessly.
And not only that, it also manages to convert the streams on-the-fly, so you don't have to wait for the transcoding process to finish before playback starts.
On my 2.26 Ghz MacMini Server, this worked even with 1080p material.
For Windows 2008 Server users out there: Remember to install the Desktop Experience Feature in the Server Manager if you intend this to work.
Of all the stuff I had a look at, this really provided instant-success - even though I'm now probably sending the contents of my harddrive to orb's central server (sigh)
