Air PlayIt (iPhoGame Dev, inc., FREE)
Air PlayIt is a FREE media client and server for streaming both music and video over your local network as well as over the Internet. There are currently several apps that do either part or all of what this app offers, but none of the free apps in the app store offer both the functionality as well as quality that this app offers. There are though still a few issues that will prevent me from using this as my primary video application, I will outline them below. However for a free app, they do a good job of delivering what they say they can deliver. This is not a universal app, but both the iPhone and iPad version are available for free in the app store and both function in the same way other than general lay out.
As of writing this I have yet to find an application that can perform better than Air Video. I use this app regularly and have reviewed it; not only does it have a large portion of the features that I would like to have in an app such as this, the cost is relatively inexpensive ($2.99). It is also a universal app and I have very few problems at all with the app or the server. Upon downloading and using AirPlayIt, one of the first things I noticed was how very similar the UI looked to Air Video. Although I suppose there are only so many ways to present the content, I almost had the stinking suspicion that they were inspired by the later.
The experience of setting up the server and getting going took relatively little time, I downloaded the server at:http://www.airplayit.com and started it up and then tab by tab went through all of the preferences to get it configured properly. This is where I noticed a few features that Air Video didn’t have that we’re quite nice. Setting up was easy and I had the ability to setup permissions on a folder level for each users. The users each could have an individual password and could be things like: adult, kids, guests. The idea being that the content which is not age appropriate and perhaps not guest appropriate could be secured behind a password preventing these users from accessing those folders. There is also the option of setting up audio files allowing you to stream an audio library in addition to videos.
After setting up the server I began testing out the app, again very simple to get going. This was when I started to notice some of the issues that I referenced above. One of the first problems I noticed was that it did an encode of every video I played regardless of whether or not it was needed. This posed a serious threat to my system as this encode also used up all of the available CPU. This however was remedied last week with an update to the app that allowed me to specify it to force an encode or not. By default this is now off which means it is no longer a problem. Also when encoding a video file, whether needed or not, the video itself paused roughly every ten seconds. This pause is enough to make the viewing process a problem. Luckily now that I can have it not encode the files that is a lot better. The viewing process is very similar to Air Video, although Air Video uses their own custom player which you may or may not like. AirPlayIt allows you to switch easily between full screen or partial screen when on the iPad, and adjust things. You can also use ’s Air Play to watch th video on any air play enabled device such as an TV, but here is where that went wrong, unfortunately it does not support background watching of the video. This means if I leave the app while the video is playing or even hit the sleep button on my device, the video stops. This one issue alone cost them a full star and makes the app not usable for me. More often than not I use such an app with my TV and so to essentially loose this ability means that I cannot use it.
But for those of you who do not use it for anything more than paying on your device, I think you will find that the feature set more than makes up for any of its short comings and the fact that it is free means it hurts you nothing to try it out. They’ve done a nice job with both the client and the server and have features in the client such as compression queue, download to the application, and a history of video files you have watched. These are features that I have not seen in a lot of other apps and they are great to have. I was quite skeptical when I first found this app as to how it would match up to competition. But I think they have done a great job and with a few additional (but necessary) features could have a 5 star application.
