Air Playit

Air Playit is a video streaming application for Windows. It is a great tool that allows you to share your video and audio library with any iOS or Android device, or even with other devices if they have a web browser capable of video streaming playback.

Air Playit consists of two apps. One is the server, which is installed on your Windows or Mac OS X computer. The second part is the client, which you can download from your phone's app store. I did my testing of this app with the Windows server and the client was installed on my iPhone 4.

The installation of the server was really easy, and the service started running automatically. The client could detect it out of the box, with no tweaking necessary on my own network. I added a folder to share and then I re-started the service (which you have to do every time you add a folder to be able to see it in the client). Then I saw the list of files within that folder, and a snapshot of every video file.

Playing a file in the client is as easy as tapping on the video or audio file and then on "Play". There are of course more settings that you can play with on the client side of this service. For example, you can force the conversion of files. This is great for when you have limited bandwidth and you want the video to run smoothly. Air Playit can convert files that are not supported by the iPhone, for example, and then stream those files as they are converted. You can also tell the application to start converting a file without playing it, so that you can play it later.

In my testing, this app worked great. I love how easy it is to setup and use. The videos looks very good and I didn't have to wait for any videos to buffer. If you want to, you can also access your video library with this app from outside your home network, but some configuration will be needed.