Rob’s Personal Aggregator

If you haven’t already heard about Air Video, it’s an iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad app with a backend server component that allows for the streaming of video from your computer to your touch/phone/pad. It supports an impressive array of codecs and can either convert on the fly or convert and store to your device. It costs $2.99 (CDN) and is probably the most worthwhile app I have come across. I even read a post where a person was able to transcode 720P on a 1.6GHz Athalon (64?). To make things even better you can stream outside of your LAN over 3G or wifi. I was successful in getting this working on the Macbook but have not yet tried running under Wine. I will update this post when I have time to test this functionality.

So, while there is no Linux native port of the application it works very well under Wine, a free software application that aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems to execute programs written for Microsoft Windows. The steps to running Air Server via Wine are:

1. Install Wine: search for Wine in Synaptics software manager, check ‘Wine’ and click Apply.

2. Download and install Bonjour for Windows: download Bonjour here, then right-click the exe file and open with Wine. Otherwise you can run the command: /> wine BonjourSetup.exe from the command line.
3. Download and Install Java JRE: download latest JRE here, be sure to choose the Windows Install Offline version. Again run this program in Wine via right-click context menu or /> wine .exe from the command line.
4. Download and Install Air Video Server: you can download the latest stable version here. However, at the time of this post there was a bug where Air Video would report that the version of Bonjour installed was not the latest version. Fortunately, there is ample developer support of Air Video and a fix was released (2.2.6 Beta2) which you can download here. Depending on the age of this post you will probably wish to use the latest public version.

The only difference I have found running Air Video on Linux was that you had to specify the IP address of your server, Air Video was not able to discover it on it’s own, but this is hardly a problem as you only have to do it once… unless you’re using DHCP in which case you might want to assign yourself a static IP.

So, do yourself a favor and purchase Air Video. You will not be disappointed!