Stream Audio/Video To Mobile Devices Using Air Playit

Air Playit from Digiarty Software is a free video streaming application that streams audio/video from local computer to mobile devices like Apple iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Google Android phones.

This is because of the ability of Air Playit to function as a personal multimedia cloud where all the videos and audios are hosted on a computer and streamed to mobile devices as and when required. It has built in 320 different audio/video codecs supported and streams the multimedia files via WiFi and 3G/4G networks.

To get started, two things are required, the Air Playit server and the mobile device client. Download them from here. The server application is available for Windows and Mac.

Installing the server is straightforward, simple follow the wizard and let it complete.

Once complete, launch it, the interface is easy and simple to use.

Before sharing specific multimedia files, it is a good idea to know different groups so that the sharing can be managed for them as desired.This is done by the Permission tab where default different groups like Admin, Kids and Public are listed with their own PINs. So share only appropriate multimedia files for each of the group.

One feature that would have been better here is the ability to make custom groups which would have made permission setting and security more granular.

The Shared Folders lists all the folders that are shared along with the groups with whom they are shared.The permissions for each of the group can be removed for individual folders as and when needed. With this is also the feature of importing the iTunes playlist directly too.

The Conversion tab allows to download and convert videos to the mobile devices for viewing them offline.

The Web tab is used for remote management of the Air Playit server.Enabling the check next to option of “The server can be accessed by browser” makes it possible to access it just like any website and manage it remotely.

The Setting tab has miscellaneous features like changing the default port of server, enabling check for new version and whether to start up automatically.

For accessing the shared multimedia folders through iPad or iPhone (Android client is yet to be released), connect via network and look for published servers (this automated discovery is done using the Apple Bonjour service), select as per permissions and browse the contents to start streaming.